YouGlish－Use Youtube to improve your English pronunciation

-

Visit YouGlish.com

I embedded the widget here. Feel free to try it.
It will play automatically, please press pause to avoid sounds.
When it comes to learning English, I guess many learners would love to better their pronunciation! Although we can check up the dictionary to see the phonetics of a word, sometimes we just don't know how to pronounce by ourself or we are not sure about it. You might say, nowadays, there are online dictionaries that provide sounds for us to listen to. 

 YouGlish offers learners a tool to listens to how real people pronounce a word in a context! Isn't that wonderful?! For me, myself, I feel excited because during my long learning years, I had this problem! I want to hear how people really say it in real lives!
In the past, I would go search 'how to pronounce ***?' on Youtube, but what I could get is like a teaching video clip that just pronouncing it. 

 When you search a word on YouGlish, it searches the word on YouTube videos and gives you the short clip of your target word. 
So, all the speeches, narrations etc. on YouTube becomes our English pronunciation teacher. You would be able to know how real people say a word in real life context.

You can narrow down your search by word class (noun, verb, adverb, adjective), by phrase form (?,!), by topic using the hashtag (#topic), or any mix of them.

Word class examples:
Phrase type examples:
  • call ? ('call' in interrogative form)
  • call ! ('call' in exclamative form)
Topic Examples:

(examples from YouGlish.com)



Tutorial for using YouGlish

Check out this short tutorial clip I just created using Screencast-O-Matic.


Using YouGlish in Taiwan

English learners in Taiwan may find it useful because Taiwan lacks a English speaking environment. We found that after learning English for so many years but we can't communicate with English speakers at first! Why?!
I think it may be because when we learnt English at school, we had more reading, writing than listening, speaking. Also, our listening input only comes from our English teacher ONLY; otherwise, it would be a machine like sound or it just so clearly and slowly pronounced. As a result, when we encounter foreigners in real life, we turn out not understand not because of poor English but because of the gap between the English we learned and in real life.

Ways of using it with primary school students

For young learners like my students in primary level, I would like to provide this tool with wordsift together to make a vocabulary mind map. I usually do mind maps with my students and sometimes they just lack of stimulus. Of course mind map is for brainstorming but doing some preparation before making it is a way to gradually lead them there.

Also, I would like them to search a word they want to search and them record the one they would like to follow to me or to the class group.
If I'd like to collect them individually, they can use Vacaroo.(should be introduced in another post)
If I'd like them to upload to a class platform or discuss forum, they can use padlet.(I create a padlet, click to see and feel free to really make comment on it. P.S. adding voice and video only supported on Chrome and Firefox)
 


In all, I list few pros and cons of YouGlish

⭑ You listen to a word in real context.⭑ You can learn words collocation because it is a talk.
⭑ You can replay or listen to the next video's.
⭑ You can slow down or speed up.⭑ You have different accents to choose from.
⭑ You can look up different forms.
⭑ It can be embedded in your website or blog...etc.

▲ Sometimes the audio is not so clear. It will be not much beneficial to beginners.
▲ I suggest learners practise the pronunciation through it and check the phonetics at the same time.
▲ It is more like a video pronunciation dictionary so it can not provide a systematic way of learning English.




Comments

Post a Comment