E-Tools for Pronunciation: Focus on Phonology

Mengjie Xu, Mohammad Stroshein, Shanda Eisel, & Wesley Chen

TESOL Methods Fair, June 24, 2015
http://e-toolsforpronunciationfocusonphonology.weebly.com/
Selection/Evaluation Criteria: e-tools that target learners from multiple levels of proficiency, age, and learning styles; large amount of content and range of
activities; ease of finding and using the e-tool; phonology focused.
Abstract: This collection of resources focuses on presenting ten free E-Tools that are useful for teaching and/or learning various phonological skills. The e-tools we
found do have other skills incorporated, but we selected them primarily on being focused on pronunciation. The tools are listed according to the order in which we
found, tested, and approved them as meeting our selection and evaluation criteria listed above.
E- tool & URL

Skills/Description

Spokenskills: We Speak Your

Language
spokenskills.com

Spokenskills has lots of information for ESL teachers and has a robust section for pronunciation and phonology practice.
The website is full of interesting activities for practice with vowel sounds, consonants, word stress, intonation, and
minimal pairs. The website is comprehensive and also has a section dedicated to English for specific purposes. There are
many categories of audio files where students can listen to native speakers producing the target sounds in authentic
sentences. There is also a feature where the student can record audio, and compare it to the sample recording.

Sounds of English: by Sharon

Widmayer and Holly Gray
soundsofenglish.org

This website has pronunciation practice for vowels, consonants, stress and intonation. It has audio buttons to help with
pronunciation, and pictures to show how the mouth should look when speaking. More than this, there are guides and
resources for the ESL teacher to download. This includes many activity resources and handouts for the ESL teacher to
use.

Rachels English
rachelsenglish.com

Rachels English is a website that is founded by the author of the book American English Pronunciation, Rachel Smith.
It has over 400 videos to teach English sounds, keys to conversation, rhythm, intonation, linking and stress. It has tons
of resources for non native speakers of English who want to improve their pronunciation, along with ideas and activities
for ESL teachers to use. The videos have been viewed over 20 million times and more continue to be added. The site has
some limitations; it is basically only videos, no materials or interactive content.

The Speech Accent Archive

George Mason University
http://accent.gmu.edu/

This site contains sound files of native and nonnative speakers reading the same passage aloud. Each speech sample is
accompanied by a phonetic transcription. Learners can hear and compare different accents. They can also compare the
accents to their own. One really interesting thing about the database of sound files is that each person who was recorded
has biographical information listed about them, like place of birth, first language, other languages, and age when they
first learned English.

Train Your Accent: ESL

Accent Reduction Training &
Conversational English
Practice
http://www.trainyouraccent.co
m/index.htm

The purpose of this site is to help students improve their understanding of relaxed speech and reduce their accents to
enhance comprehensibility, and learn how relaxed speech is used with vocabulary and expressions in everyday
language. Rather than giving students some general rules and sample sentences unrelated to everyday life, this site tries
to combine both listening and pronunciation practice with language samples that students can incorporate in their daily
conversations. The site offers a really simple but effective chart that guides students in the use of the schwa sound to
reduce several words. The site uses really good scaffolding techniques, adding reduced vowel symbols into some of the
instructions for other activities. The lessons are not great in number, but they seem to be very clear. There is good use of
learning strategies on this site.

English Pronunciation:
https://play.google.com/store/
apps/details?
id=com.study.english.pronunc
iation&hl=en

This English Pronunciation Training application teaches some very important topics about speaking English properly.
These include, among others, the topics of short vowels, long vowels, double vowel sounds, voiced consonants,
voiceless consonants, other consonants, mouth and tongue positions when pronouncing sounds, and voiced and
unvoiced sounds. Moreover, there are some unique features that helps you learn to pronounce English better: 1) You can
hear the pronunciation and many examples about that. 2) You can tap on the words in practice area to hear the correct
pronunciation of that word. 3) Pronunciation videos with phonetics letters that helps you know the right way to
pronounce a word. 4) You can view your progress. 5) You can earn points after making correct pronunciations.

American English
Pronunciation:
http://pronuncian.com/

The website resource brings American English pronunciation to the forefront, teaching you online and at your own pace
how to speak with an American accent. It includes American English Accent Exercises and even more playable audio
files. As for the pronunciation lessons, there are 3 main topics: Vowel Lesson Set, Consonant Lesson and Stress Lesson.
Each lesson explains very detailed information regarding proper nouns, such as explaining what a long vowel sound is,
and the understanding of voiced and unvoiced consonants.

Perfect Pronunciation:
This website is very impressive. It is sponsored by Merriam Webster Learners Dictionary, and has a lot of vocabulary
http://www.learnersdictionary. learning built into it. There are a total of 15 sessions and 75 exercises. It is a very clear, simple, effective resource for
com/pronex/pronex.htm
ESL learners. The activities provide two different ways of demonstrating the target speech. Then the student will repeat
after the audio recording for their practice, they then take a short quiz about the material. One of the problems with this
section of the Learners Dictionary website is that if you click to go somewhere else, it is very hard to get back to the
pronunciation page. Bookmark it!

BBC Learning English

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldse
rvice/learningenglish/gramma
r/pron/sounds/

This website is simple and focuses on the phonology of vowels and consonants. It uses the phonetic alphabet to teach
the individual sounds of the English language. There are individual lessons framed around each symbol and some
minimal pairs that are associated with the target sounds. The lessons are taught by a qualified ESL professional on
video. The videos are interesting in the way they are shot, with two camera angles showing the face and a close up of

the mouth of the presenter. This helps in repeating the target structures, and recognizing pronunciation skills.
10

Manythings.org
www.manythings.org/pp/

This website claims to have Interesting things for ESL students and its true. It contains a wide range of ESL language
skills activities. Our focus is on pronunciation and phonology and this website has a lot of it. The section for
pronunciation practice has many interesting learning strategies incorporated into several different types of lessons.
There are 24 interactive listening activities just on minimal pairs. The listen and repeat videos are also very helpful for
practice; The categories are accents, L and R, R-colored vowels, vowel diphthongs, final consonants, and consonant
clusters. Within the listening and speaking tab on this website, there are several other sections besides the English
pronunciation practice; they include: audio concentration games, ESL videos, listen and repeat, and listening to naturally
spoken English.