A Case Study Of An English Learner s Use Of Carnegie...

A NativeAccent Case Study This paper describes a case study of an English L2 learner’s use of Carnegie Speech’s NativeAccent online speech recognition software. The target student, in this case study, significantly improved her English pronunciation and fluency through the individualized exercises offered by Native Accent’s Intelligent Tutor lessons. However, the student’s word stress results were considerably lower after completing all of the Intelligent Tutor lessons compared to her initial assessment results. Her grammar skills remained constant through this case study, exhibiting only a slight improvement. For this target student, NativeAccent represents an improvement over previous technologies designed to teach English pronunciation. Nevertheless, she expressed concerns regarding the software’s unforgiving nature, which for her was excessively stressful and counterproductive. Target Student The target student, who willingly participated in this case study, is a 43-year-old naturalized US citizen who grew up in Thailand. The student immigrated to the United States when she was 26 years old. She is as a highly proficient English L2 speaker who graduated from an international university in Bangkok, where all courses were taught in English. The target student’s initial NativeAccent online assessment revealed her baseline English proficiencies to be 74% correct pronunciation, 82% correct grammar, 98% correct word stress, and 88% correct fluency. The target student felt her