Xtranormal and Language Learning

During the concluding weeks of the Fall 2010 semester, the LCLC looked into the program Xtranormal as a vehicle for language learning at UIC. Xtranormal boasts that "if you can type, you can make movies." The basic idea is that users generate scripts for avatars to then act out, which includes adding body motions, picking a setting, and other minute aspects of the avatars' appearances.

It sounds like an ideal software for helping students practice their language skills at home by simply typing conversations in to the website and then watching them magically acted out right before their eyes. If only this were a perfect world. When we were experimenting with the program, there were several things that created stumbling blocks:

1. Rendering: once everything is created, it can take A LONG TIME to create the video output. How long is a long time? We experienced delays of up to 20 minutes for a two avatar, six line exchange.
2. Prosody: as with almost all text to speech programming, it has a very long way to go before it is capable of carrying the same intonation, pacing, and emotion that native speakers have. 
3. Language: don't expect this software to be able to have two avatars speaking different languages. Even when selecting English as the primary language and creating a Spanish speaker through using the English phonetic spelling of words, the result was very messy, and when this is combined with the prosody problems mentioned above, forget about it! 

A bypass to the issues presented in 2 and 3 is having students record their own dialogue rather than using the text to speech option. However, then why would using this site be more advantageous than simply having your students create a skit and skipping all the rendering woes?

View one of our Xtranormal videos at:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7628421