Chapter III. Case BELKA. Ivan playing with speech synthesizer during a phonetic exercise

During this case, Ivan and Tatiana do various literacy exercises to practice Russian letters, sounds and spelling, using eyetracker, speech synthesizer, and LINKa app (https://linka.su/looks).

In this case (BELKA, squirrel), the teacher asks Ivan to select a correct sound out of three sounds/ cards present on the LINKa's interface. The exercise may be called “a phonetic analysis of a word.” It aims at teaching children to name the features of sounds in Russian language. Ivan needs to choose one of the three options: soft consonants (shown as a green circle on the screen), hard consonants (blue circle) and vowels (red circle). During this case, Ivan discovers that he can use the sounding function of the speech synthesizer, and starts to “play around” with it, voicing the same sounds multiple times which produces a funny effect. He shows visible joy from this newly discovered opportunity to not only silently choose answers, but also to play with voiced sounds. Tatiana doesn’t acknowledge this “discovery” and doesn’t share Ivan’s joy. Instead, she proceeds with “business as usual” (or assignment as usual) and reads Ivan’s actions as correct or incorrect answers. This case shows specific "learning opportunities" - points in the classroom interaction when Ivan takes the initiative and influences the ongoing school activity. Ivan's initiative, however, is not acknowledged and taken up by the teacher.

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Case BELKA (Squirrel)

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