Spoken L2 teaching with contrastive visual and auditory feedback

Teaching strategies and positive results from training of both perception and production of spoken Swedish with 13 immigrants are reported. The learners participated in six training sessions lasting thirty minutes, twice a week. The training had a positive effect on the L2-speakers’ perception and production of individual Swedish sounds, stress, intonation and rhythm. The positive results were obtained through auditory and visually contrastive feedback provided through a PC running the IBM SpeechViewer software. Skill building modules together with the Speech Pattering Module “Pitch and Loudness” was used, that displays the speech signal as graphical curves and diagrams. A split screen offered a comparison of the student's production with a correct model by the teacher. Pitch and loudness were displayed either separately or combined.