Abstract
To achieve pedagogic goals and deal with environmental constraints such as noise when lecturing, teachers adapt their speech production in terms of frequency, intensity, and temporal aspects. The mastery of appropriate vocal skills is key to teachers’ speech intelligibility, health, and educational effectiveness. This project tests the relevance of virtual reality (VR) for training teachers’ vocal skills by simulating a lesson in a realistic VR environment characterized by adjustable constraints such as background noise and fidgety children. The VR environment depicts an elementary school classroom with 16 pupils aged 9 to 12 years old animated with typical childlike actions. To validate this virtual classroom in terms of speech characteristics, we conducted acoustic analyses on the speech productions of 30 female teachers in three conditions: (1) giving a free speech while facing the experimenter (control), (2) teaching in their usual classroom (in vivo), and (3) teaching the same lesson in a virtual classroom (in virtuo). The background noise in the VR setting was adjusted for each talker so it was similar to the level measured in vivo. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed that teachers significantly increased their voice frequency, intensity, and intonation and made longer pauses while speaking in vivo and in virtuo, compared to the control condition (p < .001). These voice and speech adaptations (partly related to background noise), the strong feeling of presence, and the lack of side effects suggest that the virtual classroom may facilitate voice training and rehabilitation for teachers.
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Acknowledgements
Angélique Remacle was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research–FNRS (F.R.S.-FNRS, Brussels, Belgium). This work was supported by a Canada Research Chairs grant awarded to Stéphane Bouchard and a grant from the Commission Mixte Permanente Québec/Wallonie-Bruxelles awarded to Stéphane Bouchard and Anne-Marie Etienne. We thank Amandine Regnier for her assistance with data collection; Sysmex Belgium N.V. for providing the NL-21 sound level meter used in the study; and Jean-Jacques Embrechts, of the Montefiore Institute at the University of Liège, for his assistance with the calibration of the noise level in the VR environment.
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SB is president and part owner of In Virtuo, a company that distributes virtual environments.
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Remacle, A., Bouchard, S., Etienne, AM. et al. A virtual classroom can elicit teachers’ speech characteristics: evidence from acoustic measurements during in vivo and in virtuo lessons, compared to a free speech control situation. Virtual Reality 25, 935–944 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-020-00491-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-020-00491-1