THE EFFECTIVENESS OF READ-ALOUD LEARNING METHODS WITH PICTURE STORYBOOK MEDIA TO IMPROVE RECEPTIVE AND EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS IN EARLY CHILDREN

This study aims to conduct empirical research to determine the difference in effectiveness between the read-aloud learning method and serial image media with other methods usually used by teachers to improve receptive language skills in early childhood. This type of research uses a nonequivalent control group experimental design with a quantitative approach. The variables in this study consisted independent variable in this study is the read-aloud learning method with picture story media (X), the dependent variable in this study is expressive language ability (Y1) and expressive language ability (Y2). The results showed that (1) the read-aloud learning method with picture series media was more effective than the learning methods commonly used by teachers to improve receptive language skills in early childhood, statistically, the F = 5.766 with a significant level of p = 0.022 smaller than 5%; (2) The read-aloud learning method with serial picture story media is more effective than the learning methods commonly used by teachers to improve expressive language skills in early childhood; statistically, the value of F = 1,028 significant level p = 0.012 less than 5%. The results of this study can provide new insights and innovations in the effectiveness of learning the read-aloud method in storytelling activities that are useful for developing children's receptive and expressive language skills

Intelligibility Across a Reading Passage: The Effect of Dysarthria and Cued Speaking Styles

Objective: Reading a passage out loud is a commonly used task in the perceptual assessment of dysarthria. The extent to which perceptual characteristics remain unchanged or stable over the time course of a passage is largely unknown. This study investigated crowdsourced visual analogue scale (VAS) judgments of intelligibility across a reading passage as a function of cued speaking styles commonly used in treatment to maximize intelligibility. Patients and Method: The Hunter passage was read aloud in habitual, slow, loud, and clear speaking styles by 16 speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), 30 speakers with multiple sclerosis (MS), and 32 control speakers. VAS judgments of intelligibility from three fragments representing the beginning, middle, and end of the reading passage were obtained from 540 crowdsourced online listeners. Results: Overall passage intelligibility was reduced for the two clinical groups relative to the control group. All speaker groups exhibited intelligibility variation across the reading passage, with trends of increased intelligibility toward the end of the reading passage. For control speakers and speakers with PD, patterns of intelligibility variation across passage reading did not differ with speaking style. For the MS group, intelligibility variation across the passage was dependent on speaking style. Conclusions: The presence of intelligibility variation within a reading passage warrants careful selection of speech materials in research and clinical practice. Results further indicate that the crowdsourced VAS rating paradigm is useful to document intelligibility in a reading passage for different cued speaking styles commonly used in treatment for dysarthria.

Active maintenance in working memory reinforces bindings for future retrieval from long-term episodic memory

Many theories assume that actively maintaining information in working memory (WM) predicts its retention in episodic memory (EM), as revealed by the beneficial effects of more WM time. Here, we examined whether affording more time for intentional WM maintenance does indeed drive EM. Participants either intentionally or incidentally encoded sequences of four words presented during trials of simple span (short time) and complex and slow span (long time). Long time intervals entailed a pause of equivalent duration between the words that presented an arithmetic problem to read aloud and solve (complex span) or a blank screen (slow span). To ensure similar encoding of the words across the intentional and incidental encoding groups, participants silently decided whether each word was a living or nonliving thing via keypress (i.e., an animacy judgment; Experiment 1) or read the words aloud while pressing the spacebar (Experiment 2). A surprise delayed recall test at the end of the experiment assessed EM. Longer time in WM, particularly during slow span, improved retrieval from EM for both intentional and incidental encoding groups relative to short time, but for different reasons: modeling of the data indicated that longer intentional encoding increased binding memory (i.e., retrieval of the items’ positions in the trial; Experiments 1 and 2), whereas longer elaborative but incidental encoding increased item memory (i.e., memory of items irrespective of their bindings; Experiment 1). This suggests that time spent actively keeping information in WM is special for EM because WM is a system that maintains bindings.

Training in the creation of interactive read-aloud video books as a medium for children's digital literacy

Literacy has not become a flagship program at the PKK of Grabag District. However, literacy problems in this group are quite complex related to the lack of literacy facilities, lack of literacy movement assistance, and the tendency of gadget addiction which makes literacy culture quite worrying. Community empowerment for PKK members in Grabag District aims to provide training and assistance in the creation of interactive read-aloud with a video book concept that can be used as a digital literacy media, especially for children. The training was carried out 4 times and video-making assistance was conducted 1 time online. The speakers who attended were interactive read-aloud practitioners, librarians, founder of Taman Baca, and the Unimma student team with 11 participants from PKK representatives in Grabag District. As a result, 4 video books have been created by participants and published on social media.

ENHANCING STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILL IN FACING THE REVOLUTION ERA 4.0

Many people think learning a language is easy because they assume we are using the language every day. Learning a language is not just being able to communicate with the language, but also knowing and understanding the meaning contained in the word or phrase that is pronounced. In study languages, especially English, most of the students experience difficulty in speaking or talking. Difficulty talk is usually caused by the difficulty to express ideas orally, limited vocabulary, limited knowledge of grammar so it is difficult to talk with the correct rules, limited ability to properly pronounce vocabulary (pronunciation), so it is difficult to pronounce a word with true, the lack of courage to speak out because of fear of being wrong. To facilitate the ability to speak(speaking), there is some pretty effective way to try, among them: expand the vocabulary, read aloud, get to know simple English, read English, conversation English, listening to English songs, watching English movies,love the subjects English. In this paper also discussed methods teaching role-play and media pictorial story to improve the ability of English-speaking students.

A survey of narrative listening behaviors in 8-13-year-old children

Leisure reading confers significant benefits to children in both social and academic domains. However, the number of children who read for pleasure is decreasing and has been recently shown to drop off significantly between the ages of 8 and 9. Despite the rising popularity of audiobooks and podcasts, research on children listening to spoken stories remains in its infancy. Thus, the present study explores how children engage with these novel media. Fifty-two parents of children aged 8-13 years completed an online survey which asked about their children’s listening habits. Results showed that 74% of children listen to spoken stories, with the vast majority (92.5%) listening at least 1-2 times a week. While the survey revealed children are indeed engaging with both podcasts and audiobooks, being read aloud to continues to be the most popular format for story listening in this age group (77.4% of listeners). Across platforms, the genre most frequently listened to was fantasy stories (84.9%; more detailed descriptions of popular themes and sub-themes are described). In sum, access to technology is becoming an increasingly important part of children’s lives. The data described here provide a timely perspective and provide a basis for informed studies of listening engagement in children.

Acoustic Features of Oral Reading Prosody and the Relation With Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension in Taiwanese Children

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody—the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud—predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades 3 and 4), and oral reading prosody in Taiwanese third-grade children ( N = 109). In the oral reading prosody task, children were asked to read aloud a passage designed for third graders and then to answer forced-choice questions. Their oral reading prosody was measured through acoustic analyses including the number of pause intrusions, intersentential pause duration, phrase-final comma pause duration, child–adult pitch match, and sentence-final pitch change. Results: Analyses of variance revealed that children's number of pause intrusions differed as a function of word reading. After controlling for age, vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, and word reading, we found that different dimensions of oral reading prosody contributed to reading rate. In contrast, the number of pause intrusions, phrase-final comma pause duration, and child–adult pitch match predicted reading accuracy and comprehension. Conclusions: Oral reading prosody plays an important role in children's reading fluency and reading comprehension in tone languages like Mandarin. Specifically, children need to read texts prosodically as evidenced by fewer pause intrusions, shorter phrase-final comma pause duration, and closer child–adult pitch match, which are early predictive makers of reading fluency and comprehension.

Forced alignment for Nordic languages: Rapidly constructing a high-quality prototype

We propose a rapid adaptation of FAVE-Align to the Nordic languages, and we offer our own adaptation to Swedish as a template. This study is motivated by the fact that researchers of lesser-studied languages often neither have sufficient speech material nor sufficient time to train a forced aligner. Faced with a similar problem, we made a limited number of surface changes to FAVE-Align so that it – along with its original hidden Markov models for English – could be used on Stockholm Swedish. We tested the performance of this prototype on the three main sociolects of Stockholm Swedish and found that read-aloud alignments met all of the minimal benchmarks set by the literature. Spontaneous-speech alignments met three of the four minimal benchmarks. We conclude that an adaptation such as ours would especially suit laboratory experiments in Nordic phonetics that rely on elicited speech.