My year 11 (VG1) class did their first podcast project using Audacity last week. I have enjoyed listening to their recordings and have been pleased with the creative way in which they solved the task. One area where many of them have some room for improvement is in pronunciation and intonation of spoken English. Interference from their mother tongue in the form of rising intonation at the end of declarative sentences and a tendency to use Norwegian phonemes like /ø/ in words such as cut, are just a few giveaways that these are not native speakers.
Today I came across (via The English Blog) an interesting new service: English Central promises to help students learn how to speak by modeling native English usage in videos and then allowing students to record the same sentences that are spoken by the people featured in the videos. The app scores every sentence you speak and adds it up to a grade.
I tried the latest video added, a speech on health care reform by President Obama. Of course I was pleased to be given an A for my imitation of the president!
There are currently about 200 videos on the website. I think I will let my students try this to see if they can pick up some useful speech patterns.
That was a fun place. We are the only Norwegians there as far as I could tell! But your score is higher then mine! Some of my 3rd year students need to practice their English. Think I will have them try this actually. Thanks for the tip!