PRONUNCIATION GAMES

Phonology can be fun and free

Phonetics Focus is a really wonderful new free resource produced by Cambridge English Online Ltd.

Basically it is a collection of interactive multimedia Flash based games and resources that can be accessed through the CEO website at http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/Phonetics_Focus/

What is it?
In all there are almost 20 different interactive tools all accessible through the one page. These vary from an interactive phonemic chart where users can click on the symbols to hear the sounds and so develop their knowledge of the chart and the phonemic alphabet, through to more fun games which involve shooting the correct sounds to make a word in a ‘duck shoot’ type game.

What I liked about it
All of the activity types are pretty intuitive as they draw on standards like hangman, odd one out, word searches etc and they all have clear instructions. Many of the games and quizzes also have more than one level so this isn’t just for beginners.

Some of the really exceptional features are:

• ‘Record and Practice’ which is a small tool that users can download to help them record and listen back to what they
• ‘Flashcard Maker’ which helps you to make your own flashcards by either using images from an image library or sketching you own pictures on the program, and adding phonemic symbols to them. You can then print them up for use in class.
• ‘Entry and Exit’ tests so that students can check their level before using the tools and then check again as often as they want afterwards.

Conclusion
I have to say that it’s rare to find really good computer based pronunciation materials, but to find them for free is a real exception. They are really nicely designed, work well, load pretty quickly and have made really good use of multimedia. This is a fantastic free resource that will be useful for teachers and for students of any level or age too.

HOW TO PRONOUNCE WORDS IN ENGLISH

I've been looking this week at Forvo, which is a kind of web 2.0 pronunciation site. The site allows users to request, and add audio clips of the pronunciation of different words from a huge range of languages, so if you want to know how a word is pronounced you can either do a quick easy search for the word and then listen to it, or if the word isn't already within the database, you can add it and request a pronunciation.

Writing phonetic transcriptions

Adding Phonetic Symbols to a Webpage

TypeIt.org is a handy tool that allows you to add phonetic symbols to a webpage. It doesn't just have the ones for English, but has a few other languages too. Seems like you just type in the consonants from the keyboard and click on the additional symbols to add them. Then just cut and paste the script into your page.

 

After you copy text from the above box and paste it into your word processor or e-mail message, make sure you choose a Unicode font with IPA symbols in your word processor or e-mail application. Otherwise, phonetic symbols may not display correctly.

Recommended IPA fonts available on various platforms:

Windows XP: Lucida Sans Unicode

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS

Text2Phonetics is a very handy site if you like to use phonemic script with your students. It can take a lot of the hard work out of transcribing text to phonetic symbols. You just paste in a short piece of text, click a button, and it does it for you.

You can then copy and paste the text into websites or documents.

 

Here's a few ways you might use it.

• Get students to type example sentences using new vocabulary words and convert them to script.
• Produce some sample sentences in script for your students to decode and read.
• Produce some examples of script and the original text and add some pronunciation errors to the script and see if they can spot the errors.
• Get students to translate short texts or sentences to script and then use the site to compare and check their own transcriptions.
• Create transcribed versions of conversations or dialogue and get students to draw on the intonation patterns to show where the intonation rises or falls. You could actually use short exerts from film or TV scripts to do this and then find the clip on YouTube so they can listen to hear the intonation. Drew's Script-O-Rama is a good place to find TV scripts.