Abstract:

Digital applications have rapidly become an important part of language teaching and learning in higher education (HE) in Finland. This digitalization has challenged teachers to adopt new skills as well as a new kind of understanding of technology – something that has not usually been part of teachers’ pedagogical studies. Although one approach to overcome challenge is to provide teachers with technical training and support, an even more effective solution for creating digital materials would be to bring together the technical and educational specialist. Such collaboration would enable HE institutions to create truly innovative new pedagogical technology instead of simply applying existing applications.

In this session, I will present a collaboration project between two departments at Aalto University: the Language Centre and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) research group in the School of Electrical Engineering. The project has developed an ASR-based program for learning and practicing the pronunciation of a second language, in this specific case the Finnish language. The research group had already discovered the benefits of an ASR-based program in their previous projects with other languages and in basic education: the program enables students to focus on individual pronunciation challenges by allowing limitless repetition and private access 24/7.

This particular collaboration has made it possible for the ASR research group to further develop their previous innovations and apply these to the Finnish language. For the Language Centre, the project has provided a completely new kind of pedagogical technology that can be applied to the teaching of other languages. Finally, it has forged a connection between the different institutions of the university and thus formed a basis for new future co-operation.

Keywords:

Digital literacy, digitalization, language learning, higher education.