Using TuTalk to build a tutor for Chinese pronunciation

Wenyan Zhou, Vanderbilt UniversityTiffany Taylor, George Mason University

Project concept• Tutor proper pronunciation of Chinese characters through the use

of pinyin.

Key Points• Chinese is a tonal language• Native English speakers often have trouble discriminating tones.• The same Chinese characters can be pronounced completely

differently and have different meanings.• Even when the pinyin is the same, the same characters may have

different tones, which affects meaning.• Forcing students to distinguish proper pronunciation and tone will

help: conceptualize the tone as part of the word, not separate

from it conceptualize that the same character can sound very

different depending on context

A dialogue that shows a Chinese character and its meaning, then asks students for the correct pronunciation, including tones.

Feedback specific to each possible answer choice

Plans to expand the question set

Students are shown a Chinese character and asked to write the pronunciation in pinyin.

Choosing the wrong pinyin provides feedback and choosing the “right” pinyin but the wrong tone leads to remediation

5 tones leads to 5 possible remediation branches for each question item.

A lot to learn in a short amount of time!

Display of Chinese characters

How to teach a foreign language without audio

Trying to predict and design for all possible student

responses

Explore the tool

Attend lectures on TuTalk

Read the documentation

Storyboard dialogues on paper

Put dialogues into TuTalk

Troubleshoot with the help of TuTalk Team

Revise dialogues

Repeat as necessary

How to author in TuTalk.

To plan out dialogues before putting them into TuTalk to expedite design time.

How to problem-solve.

How to decipher the documentation.

How to get help from the super-helpful TuTalk crew. (Thanks Jenny, Moses, and Pam!)

Standardize interface naming conventions: you can “select” or “pick” depending on what you are doing.

Don’t hide the choose goal/concept/say menu. Make it a button instead.

Editing and saving XML directly in the authoring tool.

A tutorial that walks a user through creating their first simple dialogue, in addition to the one in the manual that analyzes an existing dialogue.

Clear explanations of the terminology and how the concepts relate to each other for newbies.

Special thanks to Jenny, Moses and Pam for all their patience and help in troubleshooting our project!