English Pronunciation Resources for Students and Teachers

Given the many different places that "native" English speakers hail from, there is no such thing as perfect English pronunciation. That said, knowing how to pronounce words is an important part of learning any language. If you are struggling with pronunciation or know a student who is struggling, the following free resources may help:

SpokenSkills - SpokenSkills offers many different resources for ESL teachers, language professionals and students, including vowel sounds, consonant sounds, audio and video clips, and listening comprehension podcasts.

Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary - This online learning dictionary from Merriam-Webster provides 15 free sessions of perfect pronunciation exercises for ESL students. Each session includes practice with words, phrases, and sentences.

New English File - This Oxford University Press site offers pronunciation practice for beginner, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advance

d level English language learners. Students in each level can check their pronunciation of English sounds against audio files and play games to reinforce learning.

Fonetiks - Fonetiks offers comprehensive pronunciation guides for nine different varieties of the English language. Other site features include an online English dictionary with instant sound, minimal pair practice, an interactive reading course, a list of words that are difficult to pronounce, and a pronunciation guide for names of people and places.

Inogolo - Inogolo is an online American English pronunciation guide for ESL and EFL learners. The guide includes pronunciations for the names of people, places, and things.

Howjsay - Howsjay is a talking online dictionary that contains audio pronunciations for more than 130,000 English words and phrases. If the word you are looking for is not contained in the dictio

nary, you can post a question about the word on the site's comment board.

English Interactive - English Interactive links to a wide range of sites that offer English pronunciation practice. Other site features include interactive vocabulary practice with audio and conversation resources.

American English Pronunciation Practice - Charles Kelley, a textbook writer and ESL enthusiast, created this page for ESL and EFL students who need pronunciation practice. The page includes listen and repeat videos, tongue twisters, and game-like minimal pair practice using Flash and MP3 files.

Write Back Soon - Radio Lingua Network provides several different podcasts for English learners, including this phrasal verb podcast known as Write Back Soon. The podcast series consists of eight archived episodes that help ESL students understand and practice phrasal verbs.

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab - This online listening lab is great for students who need speaking, listening, and pronunciation practice. The lab provides short listening quizzes and activities for beginner and intermediate students as well as videos of long conversations and interviews for more advanced students.

Phonetics Flash Animation Project - This online project from the University of Iowa features animated libraries of phonetic sounds of English. An animated diagram, description, and audio file of the sound being used in context are available for each English consonant and vowel.

KanTalk - Created specifically for English students who need spoken English practice, this online community offers a space to practice conversations and share recordings and videos.

Busuu - Busuu is an international language learning community for people who want to practice English and other languages with native speakers. The site's integrated video-chat-application makes it easy to chat with anyone you meet on Busuu.

SharedTalk - SharedTalk is a free Rosetta Stone community that provides both voice and text chat for members who want to practice their language skills online.

Livemocha - Livemocha is a popular online language learning community that supports six different languages, including English. Students can use the site to find language partners, user-made videos, and other ESL resources.

AddLang - AddLang makes it easy for students to practice pronunciation with native English speakers over Skype. Students can also practice their English with other AddLang members using MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and AOL Messenger

UsingEnglish.com - The English Language Discussion Forum on UsingEnglish.com has a special section just for students who want to discuss questions related to pronunciation, phonetics, and other aspect of speech. The forum also offers an "Ask the Teacher" section for students who need additional help.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about pharmacy technician certification for PharmacyTechnicianCertification.com.

Read More

Speak N' Spell

If you students need help with pronunciation, listening and writing, Speak N' Spell can be the perfect software to recommend them and use in the classroom. How does it work?

The first time you open it, if you want to add a specific word list for your students you have to open the Word Maintenance, clear the table and add your own words saving your own list. Doing this, they can revise this dictionary (add or delete words), use their own set of words (clear the table and add words), or load a plain text file with words. They can also save the word list to a plain text file. Make such a file one word per line and save the file with a ".txt" suffix."

There are several levels of difficulty in which your students have to guess the word they hear:

• Easy: words with three letters.
• Medium: words with four to six letters.
• Hard: words with seven to ten letters.
• Hardest: words with more than ten letters.
• Mixed: any word included in the dictionary can be pronounced.

How to use it in the classroom? An Speak N' Spell Game

1. You will need the Speak N' Spell Software, a computer or laptop and a projector to play this game with your students.

2. Divide your students into two groups and explain that they are going to play Speak N' Spell game. First, they will hear a word and then, they have to guess what word is it in turns.

3. The teacher, then, presses the new word key to listen it. The first student who guesses it correctly has to raise his hand, spell the word and make a sentence with it. This depends on your students' level. Sometimes it is difficult for beginners to create a sentence, therefore, you can give them the chance of just spelling it.

4. If the student's answer is right, his team win a point.

5. The winner is the team that get the highest score.

Read More

20 Websites to Practice and Learn the English Language

Some students need extra practice outside of class. Fortunately, there are many different websites to practice and learn English online. Here are 20 free sites to recommend to your students:

Learn English

Livemocha - Livemocha is a popular language learning site used by millions of people around the world. Students can learn from online language lessons and chat with other language learners.

VerbaLearn - VerbaLearn is an excellent place to learn and practice English vocabulary. Students can customize the way they learn and receive mp3 study lists.

English as a Second Language - This About.com site provides thousands of free ESL resources to help people learn English. Resources include free English courses, grammar and vocabulary practice, tests, quizzes, and other English learning tools.

Transparent Language - Transparent Language offers a number of free resources to students who are trying to learn English, including an overview of the language, learning software, and online quizzes.

The English Club - This site offers free lessons, videos, games, stories, quizzes and other helpful resources to students who want to learn English for free. Students can also chat online and practice their English with other club members.

Learn English - Learn English has been a valuable resource for EFL/ESL learners for more than ten years now. The site teaches students English vocabulary, grammar, and conversation and then tests their knowledge with quizzes and games.

Learn English Online - Learn English Online offers a free 52-lesson EFL/ESL course for beginners. Each lesson includes writing and pronunciation practice.

Fonetiks - This site offers free audio pronunciation guides for nine varieties of the English language, including American English, British English, Irish English, Scottish English, Welsh English, Australian English, Indian English, and South African English.

Merriam-Webster - The online version of Merriam-Webster is an excellent place for ESL students to learn new words. The site offers a search feature, a "word of the day," and fun word games.

Babel Fish - This free online translator from Yahoo! can translate single words, a block of text, or entire web pages--a great way for ESL students to learn new English phrases.

Practice English

ManyThings.org - EFL and ESL learners can practice their pronunciation with the free audio games on this site.

ESL Fast - Digital robots help ESL learners practice their English on ESL Fast. Visitors can practice conversations for hotels, apartments, college, transportation, travel, employment, entertainment, shopping, and daily life.

ESL Forum - This online forum is the most popular ESL forum on the web. It can be used by both students and teachers who want to practice writing and discuss ESL learning.

Dave's ESL Cafe - Dave's ESL Cafe offers a wide range of resources to ESL students and teachers. Students who want to practice their English writing and communication skills will especially enjoy the large student forum.

ESL Flashcards - ESL students can practice their English with this enormous collection of free ESL flashcards and printables.

Online Books Page - Students can practice their English reading skills with the free books found on the Online Books Page. There are more than 35,000 books to choose from in all.

Bibliomania - Like the Online Books Page, Bibliomania offers a large selection of free English literature. The site also provides study guides to popular books as well as other learning materials.

IPL - The Internet public library is another good place to practice English reading skills. This online library offers free books, magazines, newspapers, and other reading materials.

Ohio University Department of Linguistics - Ohio University has assembled a nice collection of links to online English language tests. ESL students can use these tests to assess their knowledge level and determine where they need practice.

Peterson's TOEFL Quiz - Students who want to practice for the TOEFL can take this quick online quiz from Peterson's. The quiz tests reading comprehension and can be scored with the click of a button.

Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes for the Online Colleges Database at OnlineColleges.net.

Read More

Perfect English?

For more than two decades academics and publishers have propounded theories on pronunciation acquisition and training since in a global world, communicating properly with other people from all over the world has become a must.

The communicative approach is a product of the dissatisfaction of educators and linguists with the audiolingual and grammar-translation methods since these methods are not useful for learning the whole language, the real one. With the communicative approach students learn to communicate in nearly real situations, or through games and other communicative learning activities in lower levels such as dramatizacion, singing songs, tongue twisters and so on. Everything sounds great, but when you put this approach into practice there are some problems.

One problem is, how and when to correct our students mistakes? What mistakes should be corrected? If we correct all our students mistakes, we run the risk of our students do not want to speak anymore. What is more important: preserving the communicative process of the interaction or providing corrective feedback? These are difficult questions which depends on many different consideractions related to the learner.

Besides, I wonder how perfect pronunciation sounds like. Does it mean that the persons sounds like a native speaker? If the answer is affirmative, what kind of speaker: American, British, Australian, South African? What is more important: speaking like a native who makes grammar mistakes, inarticulate some sounds and make themselves hard to understand or a non-native speaker who has a lack of vocabulary but can express his/ her ideas in a clear way? Is there a 'perfect' pronunciation in any language all around the world?

Watch this video called 21 accents and think about it.

An interesting article about this topic Study Calls For New Approach To Teaching English As A Lingua Franca (July 20, 2009)

Read More