Text to speech to text: a 3rd orality?
Lawrie Hunter, Kochi University of Technology
http://www.core.kochi-tech.ac.jp/hunter/
JALTCALL annual conference 2007, Waseda University, Tokyo
In his 1982 classic, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong writes that cultures that do not have a system of writing (primary oral cultures) and those that do think differently as a result of the writing difference. Ong claims that electronic media such as telephone, radio and television have fostered a second orality which, like primary orality, affords a strong sense of membership in a group, but differently, is "essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print," and produces much larger groups. In Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy, Laura Gurak rejects pundits claims that Ong proposes the existence of an orality-literacy divide.
Now a technological development blurs the line between speech and text in a much more immediate way: recent advances have made text-to-speech and speech-to-text (T2S2T) software truly usable in a very practical sense. Workable T2S2T promises to change the nature of cognitive load constraints in text production/decoding, and hence in language learning task. In this light, Baddeley's concept of working memory looks like a most promising task design tool. This presentation makes some tentative observations based on the exploratory hands-on experience of second language users, and explores the question of how language learning support systems could be influenced the new T2S2T technological reality. All this in the context of wondering why CALL design has not reconfigured itself as a subset of User Experience (UX) work.