SITES FOR TEACHING PRONUNCIATION
Sites using Shockwave technology
Okanagan’s English Pronunciation
R/T: 10/Shockwave, Quicktime
ANNOTATION: Cutting-edge activities in pronunciation. Tongue twisters, dictation and Quicktime movies all provide instruction for minimal pair discrimination in a content-rich environment. Shockwave plug-in and 16Mb of RAM recommended.
R/T: 10/Shockwave
ANNOTATION: Join this interactive adventure with Takako by reading text while listening to streamed audio. Gap and comprehension exercises are integrated into each exercise. Some technical constraints for Mac users, but a phenomenal source for the ESL teacher!
R/T: 10/Shockwave
ANNOTATION: Interactive multimedia for ESL learners. Minimal pair discrimination for troublesome consonants, interactive animation for preposition practice and listening exercises for grammar and verb tense. Also included, an interactive module for American Sign Language. This is truly the cutting-edge of Internet CALL demos!
Sites using Quicktime
R/T: 2/QuickTime Movies
ANNOTATION: Avant-garde artist meets phonetics. Extremely artistic in nature , these clips exaggerated facial movements (differential extension) to display articulatory features of several Japanese vowels. Entertaining at the very least.
ESLoop by Geoff Taylor
R/T: 4/HyperCard/Quicktime Movies
ANNOTATION: Small animated video/audio clips of alphabet illustrate speech articulators and proper pronunciation . Always wanted to use Karaoke in class? Look no farther. Shareware focusing on minimal pair discrimination—uses HyperCard application.
Sites using RealAudio
Phones and phonemes of English
R/T: 4/AIF files, RealAudio
ANNOTATION: A sleek chart of English and British Vowels and Diphthongs. Click on a phonetic symbol to access an AIF audio file of phoneme. An efficient reference chart and a helpful way of looking at the elusive American central vowel before ‘r’.
Adam Rado’s English Learning Fun Center (elfs)
RATING/TECHNOLOGY: 4/AIF Files, RealAudio
ANNOTATION: Elfs’ "Mouth Manglers" focuses on problematic consonants while utilizing minimal pair discrimination in sentence format. "Toons & Voices" allows the learner to follow a text focusing on an idiom. The site attempts to elicit information from the user in many different ways: cloze sentences, movie reviews, and multiple choice exercises. AIF audio files are inserted in many different areas to integrate production of speech with content.
Sites using sound files
University College London Dept. of Phonetics and Linguistics
R/T 4/Sound Files
ANNOTATION: Interactive teaching of phonetics using computers, speech synthesis: great ideas for teachers and developers alike. According to UCL, "An innovative method known as "Analytic Listening" (AL) has been developed at UCL as a tool for auditory training in phonetics." Using sound files, the developers aim at later incorporating multimedia to enhance the potential of this medium for self-study and classroom teaching.
Sites providing text files only
Some Techniques for Teaching English
RATING/TECHNOLOGY: 1/No Tech. This is a TESL-L article from January 1997
ANNOTATION: A brief and basic paper illustrating some helpful classroom activities which according to author David F. Dalton "allow clear practice in production and reception and gives concise feedback to individual learners as to where their problems lie in these areas and how to repair them". Minimal pair discrimination, drills for isolating problematic sounds and an amusing exercise combining art and speech perception.
R/T: 2/No Technology
ANNOTATION: Another incarnation of the ‘English is tough stuff’ poem. The unidentified author promises, "Once you've learned to correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world."
R/T: 3/ Machine Readable Phonemes/ ASCII files
ANNOTATION: A rather large compilation of different RP minimal pairs, homophones and homographs. Author John Higgins, has basically re-indexed sections of Roger Mitton’s 1974 work, Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of English. The extensive list of RP minimal pairs can be downloaded, since they are in ASCII format.
1ST International Collection of Tongue Twisters by Michael Reck
R/T: 6/TEXT
ANNOTATION: Wondering "How much dough would Bob Dole dole if Bob Dole could dole dough?" 446 delightful tongue twisters to confound and instruct. The largest on-line database of tongue twisters available.
Pizzaz!…Tongue Twisters, by Leslie Opp-Beckman
R/T 6/Text
ANNOTATION: Create, illustrate and manipulate tongue twisters: Links to the main tongue twister databases. Several stimulating activities to bring tongue twisters into the classroom.
R/T: Links
ANNOTATION: Descriptions of commercial phonetic software
for every purpose imaginable. Prices, descriptions and pictures make this
a practical site for teachers of phonetic.
R/T: 11, Bruin Power
ANNOTATION: Visit Peter Ladefoged or Pat Keating and others in the UCLA Phonetics Lab. The Phonetics Lab journal or phonetic software are available at a small cost. Visiting this state-of-the-art Lab is a must for students or teachers interested in acoustic phonetics.
R/T: Freeware in ASCII format
ANNOTATION: Download SIL’s IPA fonts at no cost. Available for Mac and PC.
R/T: Helpful Links
ANNOTATION: Helpful computing links with several links to SIL speech analysis software.
Sites for Phonetics Labs & Professional Organizations
Phonetics Lab at the University of Washington
ANNOTATION: Phonetics Lab at the University of Washington
The International Phonetic Association
ANNOTATION: The aim of the Association is to promote the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. IPA fonts, journals and sounds of the IPA are available on both cassette and CD.
IATEFL’s Pronunciation Special Interest Group.
ANNOTATION: The site is for people who think that pronunciation should be dealt with in a systematic way in the classroom. Subscribe to Pronsig’s newsletter Speak Out! or try Spot the Accent, an interactive game utilizing Shockwave technology.
People Helping One Another Know Stuff
Comment: WOW! This is a massive pile of text!
ANNOTATION: A massive list of related links and websites providing speech synthesis and recognition technology.
Academic Resources
ANNOTATION: The Linguist contains online academic papers, job resources, research support and a myriad of other helpful links for the linguist.
An abstract by Hisako Murakawa and Stephen Lambacher
ANNOTATION: Improving Japanese pronunciation of American English [r] using Electronic Visual Feedback (EVF). Documents the results of applying this technology to Japanese speakers and provides other helpful tips concerning pedagogy in this context.
The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
R/T 3/transcriptions/developer
ANNOTATION: The Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary is a machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English that contains over 100,000 words and their transcriptions. This format is particularly useful for speech recognition and synthesis. Because IPA is not the standard here, this site is really for the serious developer.
Language Learning & Technology
ANNOTATION: An online publication looking at how technology impacts the classroom. Articles relating to technology that facilitates the teaching of pronunciation on the Internet.
Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing
ANNOTATION: Researchers at the Center for Language and Speech Processing seek to discover how language is produced, perceived, and understood. Program and conference information provided.
Commercially-available products for teaching pronunciation
Phrase by Phrase video tape series (Marsha Chan/Sunburst Media)
The American Accent Program (Ford Language Institute)
ANNOTATION: Hummingbird teaches exact production of American English phonetics, using color-coded mouth placement symbols, captions, and musical accompanyment. Videos and audiotapes provide rhythmic presentation and exercise of English sounds, words, and phrases.
ANNOTATION: Macintosh only software programs available from Heinle&Heinle. Accent Improvement, ListenPro and Wordsteps are just a few of the programs available.
Speechlab/Sprachlabor (Deutsch0
ANNOTATION: Introductory tutorials providing insight
into the acoustic foundations of human speech. Geared toward the
teacher looking to enhance the quality of phonetic lectures. Use
spectrograms, or “speech samples either existing or recorded via microphone
or sound card can be processed and altered”. Download the demo
or order the CD for 160 DM.