SPLIS Newsletter - March 2018 (Plain Text Version)
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ENGLISH ACCENT COACH
English Accent Coach (EAC) is an online tool for pronunciation created by Ron Thomson of Brock University in Ontario. It’s been online since 2012, but I just began assigning it to my students this year. I use the website version. A subset of the functions is also available in an iPhone app. Using the EAC website, students can practice recognizing and distinguishing English vowels and consonants. The site provides high variability training with recordings of 30 voices (15 male and 15 female speakers) pronouncing syllables and words. Users can play one of three games using these recorded sounds: “Vowels” or “Consonants” in which players click the sound they heard, or “Echo” in which players remember increasingly long sequences of sounds. In each game, the user chooses which phonemes to practice and the context in which they will hear the selected sounds. This choice of context is expressed as the “level”—Levels 1 through 3 are open syllables with increasing variation in the additional phoneme. Higher levels place the target phoneme in various positions within one- and two-syllable words. Throughout the website, phonemes are identified by their IPA symbols. The EAC website includes brief lessons about the phonemes and their IPA symbols, which users can explore prior to playing the games, if they wish. During the vowel game, users have the option to use colors (as in the color vowel chart) instead of IPA symbols. The Vowel and Consonant games offer immediate feedback when the user misidentifies a sound. A tone indicates the mistake, and a correction is given—the user must acknowledge the correction by clicking the right answer before he or she can proceed. At the end of each game, the user receives a report card indicating his or her mastery level for each sound, including a color code and the percent correctly identified (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Example of a report card indicating the mastery level of each sound. Users can also track their progress over time, showing overall scores for any or all games on a line graph. See Figure 2 for an example graph showing student progress. Figure 2. Screenshot of a “Your Progress” graph. I had the impression that EAC could be very useful as a supplement to pronunciation lessons. It’s clearly not a substitute for a pronunciation teacher, because it doesn’t provide productive practice of phonemes or any instruction at all in suprasegmental features of pronunciation. But the strength of EAC is that students can do intensive, individualized work on the specific sounds they have trouble with. This is a major advantage in an ESL context, with speakers of several first languages in one class. For a few years, I’ve been planning to use EAC as homework to supplement my classroom pronunciation lessons, and this term I finally returned to the intensive English program classroom after a few years of other assignments. I’m teaching a speaking and discussion class to intermediate level students whose first languages are Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. Pronunciation is one strand of the 40-hour curriculum (4 hours a week for 10 weeks). I started with a speaking diagnostic that students recorded in class. In my written feedback on the diagnostic, I commented on suprasegmental features of pronunciation and other aspects of speaking skills, and also on phonemes that seemed to pose a challenge for each student, including screen captures from EAC showing the phoneme selections I recommended that they practice. I showed students a brief tour of the EAC website and asked them to sign up and practice regularly according to their own interests and my recommendations. Each week students send me a screen shot of the “Your Progress” graph as evidence of their work. As you can see in the screen capture from one student (Figure 2), even in quite a short time, I’ve seen evidence of improvement! During the first half of the term, I’m using all the class time I can dedicate to pronunciation for lessons on suprasegmental features, while students use EAC to work at home on phonemes. Meanwhile, my students regularly record speech samples for a variety of purposes, so I’m able to provide ongoing written feedback on their pronunciation, including segmental aspects. I plan to spend a couple of lessons on production of challenging phonemes a bit later in the term. So far though, EAC is working well. Students willingly created accounts and use the site several times a week. If you haven’t already, you should have a look at the EAC website. You can recommend it informally to your students, or use it for homework to supplement your pronunciation instruction as I am doing this year. I think it can be very helpful, especially if you have students from a wide variety of language backgrounds, with different phonemes challenging different students. Check it out! Beth Sheppard is an ESL instructor at the University of Oregon. She earned her bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies from UC Berkeley, and her MA in linguistics from the University of Oregon. Beth teaches listening and speaking skills and does online teacher training. She has also taught German and Chinuk Wawa. |
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