{"id":2786,"date":"2015-03-09T08:47:29","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T15:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/?p=2786"},"modified":"2015-03-18T08:50:10","modified_gmt":"2015-03-18T15:50:10","slug":"the-vowel-worm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/2015\/03\/the-vowel-worm\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vowel Worm"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a language learner myself, I often struggle with the unique sounds in different languages. Humans are culturally-bound language learners; this means we are able to hear and identify all human sounds when we were born, but we gradually lose this ability as we get older. For example, Japanese speakers and some Chinese speakers have difficult identifying the English \u201cr\u201d and \u201cl,\u201d while English speakers have difficulties identifying the Chinese \u201cj,\u201d \u201cq,\u201d and \u201cx.\u201d When I taught Chinese a few years ago, I had students arguing that there is absolutely no difference in the Chinese \u201cj,\u201d \u201cq,\u201d and \u201cx,\u201d and I had a hard time explaining how the sounds are produced differently.<\/p>\n

Language has a critical period for learning: babies and children are naturally talented in language learning, but from birth to age 7, there is a systematic decline in language learning. Adults struggle more with language learning, but it doesn\u2019t mean foreign languages cannot be learned. This means there needs to be more effort put into language learning. Luckily, technological tools can help in this process.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I learned about the Vowel Worm<\/a> at the CALICO conference. The Vowel Worm is a real-time mapping and visualization tool developed by the Department of Computational Perception<\/a> at Johannes Kepler University. The Vowel Worm projects spoken vowels into a \u201ccontinuous articulatory space.\u201d Most speakers produce vowels within a range, and it\u2019s very rare to\u00a0hit the exact spot on the vowel chart. (After all, no individual has\u00a0the exact mouth structure!) In this demo<\/a>\u00a0from Vowel Worm\u00a0you can see how the vocalist produced his vowels in singing.<\/p>\n

Very exciting, right? Now how do educators apply this into language teaching? Brigham Young University\u00a0has developed their own VowelWorm for language learning purposes based on what JKU had developed. You can find the BYU VowelWorm here<\/a>, available in either English or German.<\/p>\n

Besides the VowelWorm, BYU also developed a system that\u2019s designed for their German class. To try out their tool, follow this link<\/a>\u00a0to sign up for an account.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

After you log in, click \u201cenroll in a course,\u201d and you have 10 courses to pick from. As you can\u00a0see, in the example above\u00a0I enrolled myself in the very first course. In each course, there will be different assignments (see the screenshot below), and all assignments are clickable links. Pick one, try it out, and have fun!<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a language learner myself, I often struggle with the unique sounds in different languages. Humans are culturally-bound language learners; this means we are able to hear and identify all human sounds when we were born, but we gradually lose this ability as we get older. For example, Japanese speakers and some Chinese speakers have … Continue reading “The Vowel Worm”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-languages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2786"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2860,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions\/2860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}