Overall, I think the main value is in the ranked, subtitled videos. The pronunciation check is not likely to be very effective and the glosses for the vocabulary vary a good deal in terms of how easy/accurate they are. Nevertheless, there is a large amount of material available, and it's worth checking out.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
English Central
English Central is mainly a collection of existing videos, rather than a producer of content. They do, however, add some significant value. First, they rank the videos for different English proficiency levels. Then, they add subtitles and provide an easy to use viewer. Next, they encourage students to record themselves speaking the lines from the video and use speech recognition software to indicate whether these have been spoken correctly or not. They also have vocabulary lists.
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Hi Brett,
ReplyDeleteJust came across your review of EnglishCentral. Thanks for mentioning us.
I'm interested in why you view Pronunciation (our SPEAK) check to not be effective? Is that a philosophical orientation on your part or based on a belief that it is just inaccurate? We've recently updated our speech engine to analyze at the triphone level (thousands of discrete sounds/blends) and also measure speakers against our database of millions of lines recorded by speakers of the same L1. With our database now at over ten million lines recorded, we have a great library that our speech scientists (all the leading figures in this area in the world) can use for data and building very accurate assessment.
We do hope to work on a comprehension check soon for videos in courses - that will most likely help immensely.
Thanks again,
David
Hi, David. The number score is essentially meaningless. When I present something like /za wa:rudo/ for "the world", for example, each of my phonemes is marked as correct, even though most of them are wrong. Finally, the research that's been published on the type of feedback that you're using is pretty discouraging.
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