Giving our students the opportunity to work on their pronunciation autonomously can be very challenging, but if we can train them, it can have huge benefits for them.
Pronunciation is probably one of the least taught skills and one that can have the most impact on intelligibility.
People can understand you when you make grammar mistakes and when you use only very basic vocabulary, but if you're not getting the basic sounds of the language to an intelligible level, then it can be very difficult to understand you however good your vocabulary and grammar is.
Well that's the lecture, so now here's what we can do about it. This is a free site called Whisper that allows students to record their speaking, listen back and then it transcribes what they say.
How to use it with students:
- Give students a text. Choose something that 2 - 3 sentences long.
- Ask them to go to: https://huggingface.co/spaces/openai/whisper
- Show them how to click on the microphone icon and record themselves reading the text. Tell them this will work best if they practice the text first. You could also give them an audio model to try to copy.
- Once they have recorded themselves, tell them to listen back and check how well they did and to see if they missed or mispronounced any words.
- Show them how to try again by clicking on 'Clear' and repeating the process.
- Once they are happy with the recording tell them to click on 'Submit'.
- The AI will then transcribe their audio recording.
- They can then compare the transcription with the original text and see if there are any differences.
- Once the students have completed the activity they can share a link with you.
- When you open the link you'll be able to hear their recording and see the transcription.
To find out more about useful AI tools, how to find them and how to use them check out my book AI Tools for the English Language Classroom: https://payhip.com/b/zIRd5
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