Teacher Discussion Forums

[Tara B]

Do any of you guys use any sort of technology for teaching pronunciation that shows pictures of sound waves? I've seen something like it on the Rosetta Stone software--a native recording is played with the sound wave shown, and then you record your own voice to see if you can match the wave. Later you can play them both back and compare them. Have you seen this kind of thing work for students?

I can see how it might help, but since it's all out of context, I wouldn't think it could be anything more than supplemental. . .

I don't know. What do you think?

[EH]

Dr. Speech is a famous software package for this. I forget if it's by Tiger Software or if that's another company that makes such programs. Try googling both. I don't think it's a cheap thing you're talking about, though. Spectrograms (pictures of sound waves) are pretty sophisticated.

I would only buy a product like that if I had a) too much money and nothing to spend it on, or b) exhausted all other ways of helping a student speak more clearly. It'd be fun to fool around with that software, but not fun enough for the cost, I think.

-EH

[AndrewL]

I have been researching this also. Pronunciation Power has some but I tried it out with a Japanese speaker and it said her pronunciation was better than mine. Ha also I tried one called Betteraccent. Not bad but it needed some work also. If anyone can add anthing to this I am also interested.

[joshua2004]

I used a program called Audacity that would show the sound waves and had lots of cool features.