Technical support for non-native students
to make an English oral presentation
This page provides non-native students of English with technical support to help
them efficiently acquire good skills of oral presentation in English.
This service is promoted by
GCIEE@U-TOKYO,
Minematsu-lab,
and
HOYA Corp.
Why technical support for your English oral presentation?
In the University of Tokyo,
most of the students are non-native speakers of English and many of them are supposed to have
chances to make an English oral presentation in international workshops or conferences.
In most of the cases, those students prepare a reading material in advance and read
the material repeatedly to try to memorize the presentation flow. Some students may try
to learn each sentence of the material by heart.
You may be able to memorize each "word" of the mateiral but it does not always mean that your presentation
is intelligible enough to the audience. Your pronunciation more or less influences the intelligibility
of your presentation. Please suppose that you have a friend who is a native speaker of English. In this
case, you may ask him/her to read your material out to check how to "convert" your material to English sounds
correctly. You may check the pronunciation of individual words or phonemes and the rhythmic or
intonational patterns in your friend's utterances. The problem is that most of the students are not lucky
enough to have friends whose mother tongue is English.
This problem can be solved technically although it may not be a perfect solution.
These days, we can find
a good speech technology to convert any English sentence to good English sounds, which is called
a text-to-speech (TTS) converter. You can click
this and
this to hear two exmaples of English TTS system output.
These utterances were generated by having two TTS systems (male ane female) read
a material,
which was actually prepared by a master student in our university for his "first" English oral
presentation in Italy.
You can see the reading material here.
One question to ask you. Do you read the material so fluently as the TTS system reads it?
If you think that the TTS system is not bad, you may want the system to read "your" reading
material instead of looking for native speakers of English. With the system output, you can
practice your pronunciation as many times as you want to improve the intelligbility of your presentation.
As for intelligibility loss due to foreign accents,
this paper
experimentally measured
the loss of intelligibility due to Japanese accents.
Are you interested in using an English TTS system?
If your answer is "yes!", you can use the same English TTS software that was used to generate the above utterances from a text. This software is GlobalVoiceEnglish Pro, developed by HOYA Corporation. You can use it on your "windows" computer free of charge but you have to take the following limitations/conditions.
You are allowed to use this software only for your English lessons, given at the University of Tokyo.
The software only runs on windows XP / VISTA / 7. We did not test the software on non-Japanese windows systems.
The license is to be expired on January 31, 2012. You have to delete this software on or before that day.
You cannot save the results of TTS conversion as audio files (save function is disabled) but you can listen to the results anytime by clicking a button to convert your text.
After using this software for your presentation practice, you have to answer some questions on this software. If many of the students need this technical support, the university might introduce an online TTS service officially to help students preapre oral English presentations.
How to download the English TTS software and how to use it?
You send an email to
presentation@gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp with the following format.
Subject: technical support for English presentation
----------------------------------------------------------------
my name: xxxxxx yyyyyyy
my student id: xxxxxxxx
my email address: xxxxxx@yyy.zzz.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Then, you'll receive an automatic reply mail, which tells you where you can download the software
and how to install and use it. We're sorry but all the documents are written in Japanese. If you
have any trouble in reading the documents, please ask your Japanese friends.
It should be noted here that we cannot give any additional support for you to install the software
and use it on your computer. We believe that the documents you can get from the distribution site
are sufficient for university students.
This YouTube video visually explains how to use this software.
After you use this software, you have to answer some questions on this software. This is very
important because we want to give a better service for students. Your feedback will improve
the quality of service.
If this technical support is not
needed for students, we will not give a similar support in the future. On the contrary, if the support is very
helpful for students, the university might consider introducing an even better TTS service for students
to prepare English presentation.
Please click here to start answering the quesitons. It will take less than 5 min.
Some other useful information especially to students who want to brush up your pronunciation.
By using the utterances generated by the TTS system, you can do "repeat-after-me"-type
practice. Further, you can even listen to and repeat the utterances at the same time.
This simultaneous listen-and-repeat practice is often called "shadowing". Many language teachers
adopt this training method to help students improve their listening and speaking ability.
Shadowing can be viewed as Karaoke-like practice, where one has to utter/sing following
the presented sounds (utterance/melody). In the case of Karaoke, you may often change the
key of Karaoka in such a case that the key of music is not suited for your key (your
baseline pitch level). Some language teachers claim that it is the case with shadowing.
Shadowing becomes esaier when the pitch level of the presented utterances is the same
as the student's own pitch level.
You can adjust the pitch level and the speaking rate (speaking speed) of the TTS system.
For details on how to adjust, please refer to the documents in the distiribution kit.
In the TTS system, 100% pitch level means the most natural pitch level of the speaker
whose utterances were used in developing the TTS system. Similarly, 100% speech rate means
the most natural speaking rate for that speaker.
So, if you know "your" own baseline pitch level, you can adjust the pitch level
of the TTS system output so that you may shadow more easily. If you want to measure your
pitch level, please move to
this page.