Software/Website Title: Phonetics - The Sounds of Spoken Language
Website URL: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#
Grade/Age Level: not suitable for young children because of jargon
Language & Content: American English, Spanish, and German pronunciation
The purpose of this site is to show the places of articulation for American English, Spanish, and German. I have only used the American English, but other friends of mine who are language teachers were really excited when I introduced them to this site. This review will only focus on the American English content. This website is useful or effective for self-study or guided study of pronunciation.
One recently added feature is an interactive diagram of the articulatory anatomy to help familiarize students with the vocabulary such as alveolar ridge, teeth, lips, epiglottis, etc. Actually, one of the drawbacks or weak points of this site is that students must have some knowledge of vocabulary like ‘fricative’ or ‘glide’ to find the sound, and then the sounds are written in IPA symbols, which is good from the perspective of a linguist, but possibly frustrating for a lower-level student who is looking for /th/ but does not know the θ symbol. One way I deal with this is by specifically pointing out to the students that inside the front cover of our pronunciation book (not in any way affiliated with this website) is an easy-to-understand chart of IPA symbols and the corresponding sounds. I also use the IPA symbols in class for the sounds we are working on to help make them comfortable with the IPA symbols.
Another weak point is that unfortunately, the website does not offer feedback or assessment for the students. Due to the nature of pronunciation, such feedback or assessment would be quite difficult as opposed to a grammar website where such quizzing or assessment would be technologically easier.
As a linguist, I appreciate the thoroughness of the step-by-step pronunciation description of the pronunciation. The layout is easy to navigate if you know the vocabulary. Although the website does not say when this was updated, I am fairly sure that this is a 2011 update because I regularly use this site in my Communication or pronunciation classes, and I do not remember seeing this feature until very recently. Although I mentioned before that a weak point of this site is that the vocabulary and IPA symbols can be intimidating or confusing to lower-level learners, I also think it is a strong point that the website uses the proper professional terminology. For example, the ‘sh’ sounds can be seen with different spellings such as shoe, sugar, mission, education, and others, so ‘sh’ might seem like an easy way to represent the sound to lower-level learners, but the spelling is not always ‘sh’, so the IPA symbol /ʃ / is really more appropriate. Why not start them out by learning the proper symbols?
The two main attractions for me that I specifically demonstrate to my students are the cross-section view of the mouth and the frontal view of the mouth. The cross-section view of the mouth is a great way to show students tongue position or the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds. The frontal view has a short video clip of a woman producing the sounds, which is particularly helpful for sounds like /f/ or /v/ for the teeth placement on the lower lip and for /th/ to demonstrate for students that their tongues really do need to come put past the teeth.
This animation and the short video of the frontal pronunciation really hook the students. They like being able to click the words and hear the pronunciation, and being able to click on the sounds and see the pronunciation as they listen. It makes pronunciation learning more interactive and interesting. Students each have individual pronunciation goals, and this features help to keep them engaged while working individually or with teacher supervision.
Another strong point is that they provide a sample of the sound in initial, medial, and final positions. For example, for the / θ/ sound, thing, toothbrush, and with are the example words. This is helpful because some students have difficulty producing or perceiving sounds in different positions. I have a student right now who often pronounces initial /θ/ as /t/ and final /θ/ as /f/. Hopefully, listening to the sounds in the different word positions might help to hear what she should be pronouncing. Another point I like is that the voiced and voiceless pairs are presented together as pairs, which makes it easy to compare the difference between /f/ and /v/, for example, especially because they can see the frontal view and also the vocal cord vibrations.
As for improvements, it should be nice if there were more links, but the site is quite thorough and is a complete resource in and of itself. Another improvement would be to include an IPA symbol chart. Fortunately, the pronunciation book my program uses has such a page, but the site would be harder to maneuver through for student without easy access to the IPA symbol chart.
Overall, I highly recommend this site, and my colleagues to whom I have recommended this site have been pleased.
