Speaking Sites

In our Oral English class with Alison McGreggor we've been looking at a lot of pronunciation and prosody sites. I want to share some of them:

http://www.manythings.org/ has a ton of resources. I like the minimal pair practice for segmental perception. If a Spanish-speaking student needs help with B-V or a Korean student needs help with F-P http://www.manythings.org/pp/ This may not be explicitly a speaking exercise; however, research suggests that perceiving sounds in your target language leads to being able to produce those sounds (Pennington, 2007).

http://www.englishlearning.com/ is another cool pronunciation site that a classmate shared with us.

http://www.eltgames.com/ESL-jobs-CoUpIn.htm has some great conversation games. I find games to be one of the best ways to practice speaking.

http://speak-read-write.com/tonguetwister.html gives you tongue twisters. I love tongue twisters for practicing speaking, because they give focused practice in context, and they are fun to practice over and over again!


http://semumf.tripod.com/id29.html combines Hangman and 20 Questions for a very cool speaking game!

I hope that these are helpful. I will add more activities that my classmates and I have devised or learned. I'll add some good websites too, of course!

Cited:
Pennington, M. C. (2006.). Phonology in Context. Phonology in Context. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan: 109-134.

Comments

  1. RubyNovember 15, 2009 at 4:43 PM

    Hey Will - Thanks for sharing these! They're all really great, but I especially like "eltgames.com" and "speak-read-write.com". As someone who enjoys engaging in conversation - and who actually got my students to increase their English language proficiency through social interactions, this site reminds me that language skills can definitely flourish when offered a time and safe space for conversation. Like you, I love tongue twisters. Though I'm fluent in Spanish, I don't practice it as often as I'd like. So, to keep my speed and prosody up, I listen to some of my favorite very fast paced songs in Spanish and sing along as best as possible. Many of them contain tongue twisters and I notice that my speed and pronunciation is definitely improved at the end of my exercises.

    ReplyDelete
  2. WillNovember 21, 2009 at 12:58 PM

    That's a cool way to keep the tongue in shape for Spanish! I hadn't thought about how tongue twisters and songs could be useful for bilinguals who work and converse mainly in one of their languages. Thank you for sharing!

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