Pronunciation tools for ESL teachers

It is impossible to underestimate the importance of pronunciation training for everyone  who learns English. Well-trained pronunciation is undoubtedly a huge part of success, as it immensely boosts students’ communication and listening skills. 

Rapid development of technologies has eased a lot of tasks, including pronunciation training. In this article, we are going to overview the best online pronunciation tools an ESL teacher can use.

First of all, it is important to define the reasons why pronunciation training is such a priority and how exactly it affects students’ general progress in the process of language acquisition:

As I have already mentioned, nowadays we have a lot of great tools to improve pronunciation that graduates of any online TEFL courses can effectively implement into their lessons. 

So, here is the list of the most popular choices worldwide:

The purpose of this app is to help the students begin practicing their American accent. Voice quality, intonation, liaisons, and pronunciation are the four basic components that make up an accent. The app focuses on all of them at once and provides a user with extremely helpful and immersive experiences.

An English Language Speech Assistant, or ELSA, was developed to assist students in perfecting their pronunciation of American English. ELSA is the first and one of the smartest artificial intelligence pronunciation coaches, driven by built-in, cutting-edge speech recognition technology. Thanks to this technology, students can listen to ELSA and repeat after it as well as get real grades and feedback on what to improve.

Dictionarist is an online dictionary where you can check words’ pronunciations and meanings. Students may improve their English by seeing the term in many sentences across various settings. This is unquestionably a highly useful and helpful tool for talks.

This app also gives a hint on a very nice pronunciation training strategy for which you don’t need any apps at all. The thing is that any dictionary actually has the function of listening to the word, including accents sometimes. Therefore, you may advise your students to check the pronunciation in the dictionary every time they are not sure about how to pronounce a difficult word.

Forvo is one of the useful apps to improve pronunciation for anyone who wants to know how a certain word is pronounced by native speakers.

Students may search for any term using this resource, and verify how it is pronounced by native speakers from different regions and with different accents.

Using music to improve students’ pronunciation is one of the finest strategies.

Songs are an excellent tool for learning a language since they help us pronounce words more accurately. It is much simpler to learn how to pronounce each word correctly once you have learned the lyrics of your favorite song by heart.

This is exactly what Lyrics Training is based on. Its users can  look through their favorite music videos, adjust the difficulty level, and participate in karaoke singing. All of these activities make Lyrics Training a truly fun and engaging online pronunciation tool.

Say It: English Pronunciation was created by Oxford University Press to teach English language learners how to pronounce terms they are already familiar with in a clearer and more understandable manner.

There are many cool and useful features like recording your pronunciation, creating a list of words you would like to practice often, playing the word slowly to hear all the peculiarities, and much more.

Google developed this free resource three years ago. This software uses an advanced speech recognition algorithm to assist users with pronouncing words correctly in English.

The user’s goal is to accurately spell the words they hear. Words and characters will rise up as a tower after every accurate answer. The higher the tower, the more difficult it is to pronounce.

Here are some other practical tips and strategies you can use to integrate pronunciation training into your lessons effectively:

Here's a table that compares each tool and provides a comprehensive overview of its features. From accent refinement to interactive speech recognition, these tools encapsulate the diverse spectrum of pronunciation aids available to educators and learners.