Curriculum development in Spanish beginner classes using artificial intelligence
Abstract
A particular challenge in the teaching of specialised languages, especially for complete beginners, is to present all language-related examples in a professionally relevant, in our case medical context, for absolute beginners. Moreover, a problem that is often encountered in mixed mother tongue groups is that even the official audio material in textbooks is too fast and difficult to follow for those whose mother tongue and the target language are phonetically distant. Almost at the same time as ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI)-driven systems were released, we experienced a proliferation of AI-based applications for educational purposes (Baditzné – Jakab, 2023), many of which can already be used successfully in language teaching and may provide a solution to the two problems mentioned above. They can be used to generate unique, contextualised, simplified sound samples, free of background noise and disfluency phenomena, based on professional materials instantly and efficiently translated, revised and adapted by AI in any language. In our study, we investigate to what extent the target language audio materials generated by AI differ from human samples, for example in segmental and prosodic terms, and to what extent they are suitable for supporting beginners’ courses in a specialized language. Our results show that among the three examined applications (Word, Speechify and Natural Reader), Word’s built-in text-to-speech synthesis function performed best, generating samples that are similar to natural speech in most respects.
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