We find ourselves at a pivotal moment where the role of generative AI and other technological tools is reshaping the way we teach and learn languages. The question that lies before us is not whether these innovations will shape the future, but rather how we, as educators, will harness their potential to create meaningful and effective language instruction.
The title of our conference, No Fate: The Future is Not Set, underscores our belief that the future is not predetermined. We hope that our conference will serve both as a platform for collaboration and a catalyst for change as it is via the collective effort of educators, researchers, and innovators that the trajectory of language teaching and learning will be determined. By fostering collaboration, sharing insights, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible, we can shape the future of language education.
Natural speech entails the production of both segments (i.e., vowels and consonants) and prosody (i.e., prosody phrasing, stress, intonation and rhythm). Correct segmental production without good or natural prosody is staccato or robot-like. In the field of Chinese as a second language, most attention is attached to the production of tones and segments, likely due to the status of Chinese being a tonal language and the difficulty of tone acquisition by second language (L2) learners. However, L2 prosody is indispensable for natural L2 speech, because it serves both linguistic and paralinguistic functions and may even have social and economic implications. To fill in the gap, this study investigates the effectiveness of training L2 prosody by combining Cued Pronunciation Readings and Chinese Prosodic Transcription system (CHIPROT). Cued pronunciation reading (CPR) is a method developed to help students perceive and practice suprasegmental features of spoken English (Landon, 2007; Tanner and Landon, 2009). It is a self-directed, computer-assisted technique which uses oral readings to improve students’ perception and production of utterance-level prosody, including pausing, word stress, and intonation. Chinese Prosodic Transcription or CHIPROT (Třísková, 2021) is a transcription system that transcribes the prosody of natural Chinese speech which annotates two major prosodic features of Chinese: prosodic phrasing (i.e., how an utterance is chunked into small units) and syllable stress/prominence. 20 participants who have completed at least two semesters of Mandarin course were recruited to attend the training study. The participants were randomly assigned to one of the two groups: the training group vs the control group. The training adopted a pre-test and post-test and delayed-test design and lasted around five weeks. The first three sessions involved the training of Chinese prosody system. In the next three weeks, the two groups received Chinese prosody training materials in MS Powerpoint (with audios embedded). In each session, the training group listened to the audios of the training sentences and carefully examine how various prosodic features were represented in the transcriptions. They also needed to record their reading of the sentences according to the CHIPROT transcriptions at the end of the whole session and embed he recordings in the MS Powerpoint before sending it back to the researchers. The control group received the same sentences, but only needed to listen to the audios and record their reading of the sentences in Chinese characters and pinyin. Before all training sessions started, both groups recorded their reading of a short conversation and commented on two familiar topics. The same recordings were obtained at the end of all training sessions. A delayed test involving both old and new sentences one week after the training was conducted as well. Following the training study, five native speakers of Chinese were recruited to rate
