A pronunciation lesson from Eliza Doolittle

I wonder if my students, in the midst pronunciation practice, daydream and silently break out in song...wishing for my great demise and capture.  You never know...but Doolittle's onto something here:

Watch first...really, the 4.5 minutes will be good for you, and your students:



Speaking practice in language classrooms, or "Drilling" as Mr. Higgins calls it, is deserving of daydreaming, cerebrally singing students.

DRILL no more, Mr. Higgins!  Tech tools like podcasting, Memoov, and lyric dubbing are fun and engaging for the same type of practice...

QUESTION:  but how does a student know or begin to hear themselves and improve their accuracy?

ANSWER:  The Speech Accent Archive, a George Mason University Linguistics project aiming to "uniformly [present] a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds"--and may I just say, what a fine collection it is!

*Note the inappropriate insertion of beaming pride for my university, linguistics dept, and yes...even the project, which I was a part of in grad school, a hundred years or so ago.  Sorry.  Well, not really*

Back to our Drill:

Begin by explaining the purpose of this little drill, and that tech tools will help keep it real and make it all happen.  Then, have students create recordings of the Speech Accent Archive "Elicitation Paragraph"

• Please call Stella.  Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:  Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.  We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.  She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
• The elicitation paragraph contains most of the consonants, vowels, and clusters of standard American English.
• This can be done with a podcast very easily,  and outside of class (taking away the age-old "this is embarrassing" barrier)...podcasts can even be phoned in using TalkShoe 

Once these recordings have been posted online, several things need to be done:

1.  The student becomes their own listener, and listens several times...noting any inaccuracies they can catch on their own.
2.  Other students (preferably from a different language) do the same thing...listen to OTHERS, note inaccuracies...but also note where their own pronunciation differs from this other speaker.  This is important prep...it TUNES their ears!
3.  Then, IN CLASS, with steps 1 & 2 completed...students analyze their own accent and predictable pronunciation generalizations using The Speech Accent Archive:

• Students locate a speaker of the same language by browsing
• Then, you have to show them what to look for (identifying the red and blue markings for predictable speech errors).  These are not linguistic students, so knowing what a fricative is can NOT be your goal here...instruct them to ignore the terminology and just follow where the red/blue marks are and listen at that spot each time they listen to their own podcasts.
• Once students have tuned themselves to the sounds speakers from their language commonly mispronounce, omit or reduce, have them listen to YOU reading it aloud several times (or even on your own podcast for them to hear again later).  Now they are hearing accurate sounds, and they are noting the changes they would need to make.

4.  Finally, wrap up this drill with another take home recording; students should make a new podcast of the same "Elicitation Paragraph"

• Please call Stella.  Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:  Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.  We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.  She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
• Do not replace the original recording with this one...they should keep that to compare with later.

5.  Now YOU go in, listen to the 2 recordings, and provide individual feedback on their improvement!

Now, let's all thank Hepburn for that Cockney accent and this TECH inspired innovation, and well...for being so darned cute.