Bog'liq The Efficacy of Legal Videos in enhancin(1)
Methodology The present paper reports on the evaluation of a sample of utterances which were used
in a CALL platform which was being developed as part of the overall project. The CALL
platform in question is
Digichaint , which was adapted from the Language Trap, a
language learning game which was developed by the Knowledge and Data Engineering
Group, Trinity College, Dublin by Neil Peirce and Prof. Vincent Wade (Peirce & Wade,
2010).
Digichaint is aimed at 16-18 year old students with specific application to the Irish
language Leaving Certificate (final State examination in second level schools in Ireland)
syllabus in mind. It is designed specifically for the aural and oral components of the
syllabus.
Digichaint is in the form of an interactive guided dialogue that allows students to
progress through a virtual world using the original
Language Trap graphics of a hotel and
its surrounds. Learners are given the task of conversing with various characters that form
part of the game.
The subjects on whom the material was tested were a group of Irish language teachers
(N=31). An Intelligibility and Clarity formula was devised which took account of teachers’
ability to correctly orthographically transcribe each of 20 sentences and also took account
of their estimation of the ease with which they could do so. For the teacher group,
intelligibility was measured in terms of the respondents’ ability to successfully transcribe
each of the 20 sentences. These sentences were marked on a 1 to 5 scale with 5
representing a fully correctly transcribed sentence. This methodology for assessing the
intelligibility was used by a number of previous researchers (Pellegrini et al., 2012;
Peterson, 2010). In addition to this, the respondents were asked to mark the ease with
which they transcribed each sentence as they proceeded with 5 representing complete
ease and 1 representing complete difficulty. In an ideal speaker-hearer situation the
hearer could be expected to be able to transcribe the utterance of the speaker with
complete ease thus gaining 5 points for
intelligibility and 5 points for
clarity . In the
system used for the present study such a scenario would be marked as
. The
extent to which sentences deviate below 5 represents a shortfall in their ease of
intelligibility or
clarity . The overall mean Intelligibility and Clarity score for the 20
utterances as scored by the 31 respondents may be represented as follows:
5 -
∑
N = total number of respondents
= the mean performance score all of respondents
= the mean opinion score of all respondents
Teachers were shown a three minute video clip of the
Digichaint game before they were
asked to partake in the transcription exercise in order to acclimatise them to the voices
and to familiarise them with the nature of the game. The sentences were chosen so as
include a representative selection of sound classes in the Irish sound system (long
vowels; short vowels; fricatives and stops) as well as samples of elision in fixed common
phrases. As the teachers provided an orthographic transcription for each sentence, they
were asked to simultaneously rate the
ease with which they did so, on a scale of 1 to 5.