Can you learn English pronunciation properly using Skype?

| 16-09-2009 | Teaching | Written by Matthew Bennett | 3 comments

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Can you teach English pronunication properly using Skype? Isn’t the line too crackly for that? Apparently not. I did a small experiment over the summer and it worked wonderfully.

A former student of mine called me at the end of July and told me she had to repeat her English pronunciation exam in September and that her lecturer was a tough marker. Could I help her pass her exam and advance towards her goal of becoming a primary school teacher?

Skype for English pronunciation practice

Oh, and she wouldn’t actually be able to come to class as she’d be working in a shoe shop at the beach and then babysitting in the Pyrenees until the end of August.

At first glance, this was going to be a tough one. I suggested we try Skype, which we did and had 10 Skype English pronunciation classes over the summer. It worked. My student passed her exam!

She had a set list of texts she needed to prepare – about 50 nursery rhymes and short stories, some of which were normal texts and some of which seemed to be designed to test certain aspects of her pronunciation.

The nursery rhymes were things like Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again

And the made up phrases for practicing pronunciation looked like this:

The two twins thought the teacher had told the truth

Which is pretty difficult to say well if you’re learning English.

From a class management point of view, the only problem that was specific to Skype was once when her Skype set-up refused to work and we had to postpone the class, and a couple of times she had to restart the computer to get it all working properly.

One thing which we found really useful was the Skype chat window when we got stuck or confused with certain words. Although you can’t do phonetic symbols in Skype, you can invent some alternative ones which do the job just fine.

Another thought I’ve had is that Skype might actually be better than face-to-face classes for teaching and learning pronunciation because not being able to see the other person forces you to listen and pronounce much more clearly than if you have the accompanying face movements and body language.

It’s also great in terms of time management, of course. You just concentrate on your pronunciation for 60 minutes and then get on with whatever you were doing. No driving to and from class, traffic jams, finding a parking space or other time-wasting activities.

I will definitely be doing some more classes like this in the near future.