Going to the Technology and SLA class has always been an eye-opening experience for me. For example, Praat, which was introduced in class this week, was one of the most sophisticated computer programs on phonetics I have ever known for analyzing, synthesizing, and manipulating speech. What amazed me most was the demonstration and practice we had in class about how it could be used to help students with tones and intonation in language class with its high quality pictures showing spectrograms, pitch contours, formant contours, and intensity contours. Praat further convinced me that, if used appropriately, professional computer programs like this could really make language learning and teaching easier and more efficient. However, like what has been pointed out by Dr. Chun, everything has its limitations, and computer program is no exception. Besides the inability in accurately recognizing and displaying voiceless sounds, I think this program is mostly useful for practicing decontextualized single sound, words, or short phrases. The change of tones and intonations in more complicated expressions and language in use would still require more explicit instructions and complementary materials.
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