Working on pronunciation

Recently I’m quite concentrated on developing my pronunciation. I’ve been trying a few things which you can find interesting.

Today I’m going to tell you about the first I tried.

I used an interesting app prepared by British Council and called LearnEnglish Podcasts.

 

It took my attention because it’s about podcasts – as you know I use them a lot.

The app includes three Series with ten episodes each. Every podcast lasts 30 minutes, so we have plenty of audio materials to listen to.

But with the app you can not only download podcasts to listen to them, but also to see scripts synchronised with audio.

How can you use it to practise pronunciation?

First of course you can listen to the whole episode. Without looking at text. After that you can check your understanding by doing some exercise.

Then you can listen to it once again with reading the text. You can also try to read aloud with native speakers if you like. But first just listen to the native pronunciation.

The next step is to use pause button – Listen to a short part of the podcast and try to repeat it, recreating sounds as aright as it’s possible.

And the last step – read the text first and that listen to the recording to check if your pronunciation was OK.

The app has some other useful tools for listening and repeating sentences. You can set an appropriate recording speed. So the app is both for more or less advanced learners.

Although the podcasts can look a little bit too easy for advanced English speakers I thing it’s perfect for pronunciation  exercises.

Day #44 - How to create your own Voki

Playing with Voki (www.voki.com) can be both funny and useful. You can create talking avatars using text or audio narration.

It’s better to start with creating an account, but it’s not necessary. You can just click the Create tab to begin making your own avatar.

 

In the window which opens you can see ramdomly created avatar, but you still can change it.  

To make it look like you want click on the button no. 1

Choose a figure (option no. 2) and accept changes with button Done (no. 3) 

Now it’s time for adding a voice. You can make it in three different ways.

The first one – changing text into speech is shown in the picture below. Type the text and choose the language. You can also choose the character of the voice: male or female, with different accents – British, American, Irish etc. It’s really enjoyable to hear those different versions of the speech. It can also be very educative to listen to the proper pronunciation of the text you prepared.

Be sure that you listen to the genereted voice otherwise at the end your avatar won’t talk.

The second way of adding voice – recording you speech. Click the button with the microphone to see the window from the picture below. Begin recording by clicking Record button (no. 1), check if everything is OK – click Play button (no.2), save the recording (no. 3) and accept all by clicking Done (no. 4).

 

The last way of adding voice – downloading prepared earlier file.  Click the button with the file to see the window below. Choose the Browse button to find the file with recorded voice, and then Download button. Listen to the recording by clicking Play button. If everything is OK choose Done button.

All you have to do now is publish your work and embed it on your website or just sent or save the link to your avatar. But remember it can exist only on the web.