Praat: an open source voice analysis tool

This is a great tool. Miraculously free.

It gives you info like this stuff here.

There's pitch analysis as well as waveforms which can be great to show your students to highlight syllable stress, rhythm and pitch.

So instead of drawing your impression on the board you can show them their voice in these visual forms. If you then do your YOURS, the differences become obvious and measurable quite a bit faster.

The download is free and is worth it if only to support the co-developer Paul Boersma in getting some press and eventually some hair gel.

Download as soon as you can. And bring that computer to class.

http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

Paul Robinson's Pronunciation in Practice

This is just for Dublin EFL teachers.

This is a recording of Paul Robinson (DELTA) giving a workshop on integrating pronunciation work throughout your English lessons.

It was recorded impromptu at CES 2 February 2011 as a part of regular in-house CES teacher development.

Forgive the recording quality but the content is good.

Click here to download.

A big thanks to Paul for giving me permission to post this here.

It just keeps getting easier to do this stuff.

http://www.wtt.org.uk/index.html

This website lets you set up free transcription teaching classes.

I think you might want to give it a go if you are an EFL teacher trainer...



Logging on as a student is straightforward. I will leave a transcription for you to do if you want to try it.

The world is spinning faster and faster.

Adrian Underhill's (very good) Webinar on Pronunciation via Twitter's #ELTchat

http://www.macmillanenglish.com/BlankTemplate.aspx?id=50650

I picked this up on the Twitter machine. There is a thread called #ELTchat. Wednesdays at 9:00 there are loads of teachers like us who get together for an hour to swap shop talk about EFL Teaching.

It's a great place to pick up resources, ideas and pals.

Here's some more

Free booklet on prosody from Cambridge for EFL teachers (What's prosody? Ask me in a couple of minutes)

The RP Phoneme Chart for your iPhone

The RP Phoneme Chart for your computer from the BBC

The same as above but as a standalone page you can play with online made in Flash (I might have to learn this program. handy.)

Check it out some boring Wednesday.

English Central is a revolution

http://www.englishcentral.com/watch

Just do it. Watch it. This is basically the best thing from 2010 on the internet. It combines the best features of the BBC's pronunciation videos and the University of Iowa's Moving Mouth to just blow any other online pronunciation and speaking application off of the internet.

It is gobsmacking. Get a student on it now. Somebody has to show me how it fails them or I am going to never shut up.

They've done it!

A talking IPA phonetic chart with GOOD sound on the same layout as the chart. God bless the flash developers...

Get some headphones and enjoy.

http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm


*Here's another one now from Peter Lagefoged's (RIP) resources.
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html 

Horrigan's Colour Coded Phonemic Chart for NEW TEACHERS

This is especially for the new teachers starting at the CES's ACELS Teacher Training Course this month.

Anne-Marie one of the teacher trainers knew of this simple way to associate those new IPA phonemic vowel symbols. The idea is actually an IH teacher's proposal (Margaret Horrigan) and here it is in a nutshell.


It's easier for our brains to associate to colours instead of to symbols, so let's associate each symbol with a unique colour.

So the æ which looks like a lower case ˈaˈ and a lower case ˈeˈ smashed together are associated with a colour instead of just a word like 'rat' or 'clap'. Ideally each symbol is memorized just with the sound it represents, but this is difficult in practice for beginners who have to learn these 20 symbols in about 24 hours. Horrigan's idea is to use the colour black to remember /æ/. It's the vowel sound in the word. So you recognise the colour on the field behind the symbol and as you say it you hear your example. This is simple and instinctive and it works across quite a few accents quickly.


Go through her PowerPoint presentation here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km15zMlFnnY


Thanks Anne Marie!