EFL learning media for early childhood through speech recognition application

Abstract

In Indonesia, English language use as a foreign language (EFL) and become one of the major subject since elementary school till the university. Sometimes it's hard to teach English language only by speech, especially to the young learner. Based on it, game-based learning combined with speech recognition has been developed. The proposed game helps and facilitates the children to learn English and introducing children to various animal themes. The game is packed in a fun and interesting concept in a form of an interactive game so that learning process could be more effective and not only to help them learn faster but also entertaining them in the process. This game is operated by using speech recognition and use Kinect as its main platform to interact with. This was chosen as the main way to interact with the application so that children can not only play the game but also improve their English pronunciation and vocabulary. The game also tested to the 30 respondents to know the usability of the system and the motivation to learn. Based on the experiments, the results showed that all respondents agreed that the proposed game has a good usability. It can be seen from the average of central tendency value that reaches about 4.38. Based on the results, we concluded that the proposed game-based learning gave new experiences, easy to use, and became fun alternative for young learners to study the EFL.