The Impact of Vocal Synthesis Feedbacks on Primary Students’ Writing Skills

Author(s):

Carole Le Henaff(presenting / submitting)Brigitte Gruson(presenting)Claude Beucher-Marsal Forence Charles

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 12 A, Literacy at Primary School - Reading and Writing

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-05

09:00-10:30

Room:

B015 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Bernard Schneuwly

Contribution

Thanks to the help of the French National Agency for Research (ANR), manufacturers, researchers on spoken interactive systems and researchers in French language didactics have developed a software in order to help young French learners (students aged 6 to 7) to produce written texts. This software has led to the elaboration of an Internet platform, hosting exercices for children who learn to read and write.

Our presentation, resulting from the conclusions of an investigation conducted among six French classes in Spring 2014, will start from this statement: by emphasizing the links between graphemes and phonemes (Saussure, 1916), vocal synthesis may enhance some phonological acquisitions and help the learner better understand the properties of the written language. Indeed, mastering phonems' and graphems' code is necessary, but not enough to enter in the written world (Maisonneuve, 2002). So it may be relevant for young learners to keep a bond between what is about to be written and oral aspects, and to study the effects of the speech synthesis on learning. Consequently, collecting and analysing data that can produce evidence of the impact of this software's audio feedbacks represents an interesting step towards the understanding of how primary school students build writing skills. We will show how we proceeded to get as much evidence as possible of the development of those skills among the students we observed.

We will particularly refer in our analyses to the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (Sensevy & Mercier, 2007; Sensevy, 2011) that will enable us to characterize the students’ actions.

We will use this conceptual background to describe the situations in which the vocal synthesis is used by the learners.

Method

Experiments with students aged 6-7 have been conducted in order to test the types of activities offered by the platform and the conditions of its use. Two configurations have been tested: computer-assisted writing session monitored by the teachers or in autonomy. To assess whether the activities have a positive impact on writing skills, two experimental phases have been conducted in six classes using the platform, during the school year 2013-2014. The first phase has been essentially devoted to the study of the software's ergonomics, while the second phase has been conducted in order to examine the effects of the vocal synthesis on the development of the students' writing skills. The phonological and prosodic relevance of the exercises has been, with the ergonomics, the main focus of the first experiment, and the knowledge contents have been the main focus of the second phase. Yet all aspects have been simultaneously, but at different degrees, taken into account during the experiments. Video data have been collected in each class using the platform so as to identify how the platform is used and the difficulties encountered by the teachers and the students. The students have been selected in each class according to their reading and writing skills, in order to examine if the vocal synthesis reduces the inequalities in the development of very specific writing and phonological skills among three categories of students: high performers, average performers and low performers in reading and writing. Interviews with the users (children and teachers) have been organised to determine the benefits and the obstacles. The activities we focused on are the words and phrase dictations, and the segmentation exercises where children had to separate sentences into words.

Expected Outcomes

We will identify and describe the conditions under which the students develop phonological and writing skills in this context. As the experiment will be implemented in Spring 2014, we will present our results about the effects of the audio feedback that is produced by the “milieu” (Sensevy & Mercier, 2007; Sensevy, 2011) of the vocal synthesis on the students’ reading and writing skills. We will particularly focus our presentation on how the students manage to use what they hear of their written production in order to improve their grapho-phonological knowledge, and in order to strengthen their word segmentation and their writing skills under dictation. We will also show to which extent the vocal synthesis contributes to reducing the inequalities concerning those skills between the students. At this time, we have observed that average performers successfully do most of the exercises because these students rely more than others on the audio feedbacks in the exercises. Our presentation will eventually show the development, on the software, of an appropriate individual course for each student, elaborated automatically on the basis of the students' profiles.

References

Maisonneuve L. (2002). Apprentissage de la lecture, méthodes et manuels. Paris. L’Harmattan. Saussure (de) F., "Cours de linguistique générale", 1916, réédition 1979 : Payot, Paris, 1916. Sensevy, G. et Mercier, A. (2007). Agir ensemble : l’action didactique conjointe. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Sensevy, G. (2011). Le Sens du Savoir. Bruxelles : De Boeck.

Author Information

Carole Le Henaff (presenting / submitting)

CREAD - European University of Brittany

Education

Rennes

Brigitte Gruson (presenting)

CREAD - European University of Brittany, France

Claude Beucher-Marsal

ESPE de Bretagne, University of Brest,UEB

French linguistics

AULNAY-sous-Bois

Forence Charles