Voice Recordings & Screen Captures in Action

Voice Recordings & Screen Captures in Action

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano

Saturday, September 3, 2015

Twitter: @jonacuso

Post 190

The teaching of sounds of a different language is no easy task for learners nor for instructors. People develop different techniques to enroot segment proficiency, what I personally call the ability to produce sounds in the target language. Some students, whose ears are more “sensitive” to changes in sound quality can easily grasp differences in segments. On the other hand, there are other pupils whose strength is connected to visual learning, and the use of videos or flashcards is transcendental.

Being an English Language instructor at Universidad Latina in Costa Rica, mostly working with English Language Teaching students, I have come across with some difficulties in trying to teach them how to make a real difference when pronouncing certain vowels sounds such as the schwa [/ǝ/]. To have my students see the difference in articulation and jaw opening, I created the video that can be reproduced below entitled “Contrastive Words” (Acuña, 2015). To sum up, videos as part of “all forms of modeling-giving” (Underhill, 2005) are enriched ways to strongly introduce visual differences in sound articulation.

The creation of this video connected to the schwa production implied the use of different types of voice and screen capturing tools: a) Gimp for picture modification 2, b) Wave Pad to edit audio, c) Video Pad to stage one’s video, and d) mp3Gain to increase volume quality. The video is hosted in my personal Youtube Channel to be given the chance of an embedding code to have it in the university’s Moodle LMS and to be embedded in my pronunciation class blog.

My pronunciation class at the university is not an online class but a F2F one. To sort of moving into a hybrid learning atmosphere, I designed a pronunciation blog where I have included basically all that is covered in the 15-week course. This video is part of week 6, and it aims at visually presenting the student how the schwa differentiates from other English sounds and what position it takes within the vowel chart. The pronunciation student can either see this video at home directly from the class blog or on our Moodle LMS anytime it is needed. However, they are first introduced to it in class.

The main challenge in using voice recording along with screen captures is in terms of its simplicity. What Skye MacLeod –a former Language Fellow from the American Embassy in Costa Rica back in 2011- explained to me was that in order to create either a podcast or a vodcast, some steps need to be met:

1. A format needs to be chosen to guarantee its briefness but also its focus;

2. A script is required to guarantee the recording’s quality;

3. The recording edition is vital to ensure good quality in sound and video; and

4. The file format needs to be compatible with the hosting system so viewers will not experience any difficulty.

By following these simple steps we can mitigate challenges for the students or ulterior implications in use.

“We’ve all heard the old adage ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Learning to read those pictures gives us advantages in both work and life” (Toledo Art Museum, n.d.). Visual Literacy is now a term currently used in language learning to train students to observe and go beyond an initial response, but to go deeper into the analysis of what it is being observed, like the pronunciation of sounds within one’s mouth.