Speechnotes and the improvement of English language pronunciation
Authors: Sulca-Guale Xavier , Lozano Celleri Adriana Nicole , Escalante Gamazo Marbella Cumanda , Hidalgo Alava Dennis José 
Published: October 2023

Introducción

One of the most difficult problems students deal with is how to improve and correct their pronunciation mistakes. In that sense, Speechnotes is an application created by Wellsource in 2018. Therefore, learners and the general public can have access to this application by downloading it in their mobile phones. This tool is an online speech recognition notepad that allows people to dictate any word or sentences resulting text immediately. Students worked with this app to later state whether this tool helped them recognize what they say by pronouncing words and sentences and the way it supported them to overcome their pronunciation issues. This research work aims to describe the dimensions and phases of the Speechnotes app, as well as identifying the benefits of this app for the improvement of the English language pronunciation. After the pandemic of covid-19, it has been demonstrated that learners have used different free online tools in order to overcome some problems when learning the target language, so Speechnotes is the app that supports learners tackling their pronunciation mistakes.

Objetivos

To describe the dimensions and phases of the Speechnotes application.

Método

This work was a descriptive research that was developed with a survey which was used and applied to 73 students. Thus, it was focused and divided into two sections considering two main research questions: 1.- What are the dimensions and phases of the Speechnotes application? which contained 10 items. 2.-To what extend does Speechnotes application benefit the English pronunciation? containing 8 questions. The Likert scale through the whole survey and the coefficient Cronbach’s Alpha were used to gather data and validate it respectively. The result of the Cronbach’s Alpha resulted in 0,856 that means the instrument was reliable. The data and results obtained were analyzed by the SPSS statistical software and described to determine the perspectives and opinions from the participants. It consisted of collecting the data from the survey and describe the real information that students completed according to their own experiences and knowledge (Groves et al., 2011).

Principales resultados

The results showed that learners consider the dimensions and phases of the Speechnotes application that stand out the most are the accessibility because they agreed on that they have free access without any registration. This aspect allows students to work freely with the application. Consecutively, the application adapts to the students’ voice while they are speaking. It indicates that the application adjusts the voice of a new speaker and recognizes the words easily. Moreover, related to the phases of the application, when the students practice their pronunciation by saying different words, dialogues, etc. The application writes them into a text belongs to the speech recognition phase. Meanwhile, when they mispronounce a word, the app writes another word instead. corresponds to the error diagnosis phase which if there is an inaccurate pronunciation, the software will not write the correct phrase. In this way, when the app does not write the word the students pronounced, they practice until the correct word is written. The feedback presentation phase was also done when learners asked their professors for assistance to know the sort of mistakes they were making in order to overcome those issues.

Conclusiones

Firstly, it was possible to identify how Speechnotes benefits students due to the fact that it promotes concentration on the individual learning challenges and brings an effective and stress-free environment with motivation as it encourages students to state their points of view according to their preferences through Speechnotes. Secondly, the application allows the practice of segmental and suprasegmental features, and it promotes the improvement of pronunciation and speaking skills in some way. Last but not least, it assists students to develop their oral communication abilities because it could be an effective means of teaching and learning English pronunciation. Speechnotes promotes autonomy in L2 learners because they prefer to perform the pronunciation activities on their own.