ESL students have been known to speak in “cursive,” a beautiful, melodious version of English that no one understands but themselves. Especially students with advanced vocabulary tend to forget that not everyone understands what they are saying.
Enter my shiny new i-pad and the very nifty app called Otterwave. This app prompts students to record their voices by reading a sample sentence. Their voice is recorded and graded for overall quality, pronunciation and timing. There is a recorded native English speaker who reads the sentence so they can play back and compare their own recording. It even offers sound waves to show their areas of weakness.
I used this on a crazy smart student from Liberia who speaks using words I would probably have to look up if I could understand what he was saying. He has a great sense of humor and always gets a chuckle when I tell him that I have no idea what he said. This time, it was the computer grading him and he didn’t do very well.
Enter my shiny new i-pad and the very nifty app called Otterwave. This app prompts students to record their voices by reading a sample sentence. Their voice is recorded and graded for overall quality, pronunciation and timing. There is a recorded native English speaker who reads the sentence so they can play back and compare their own recording. It even offers sound waves to show their areas of weakness.
I used this on a crazy smart student from Liberia who speaks using words I would probably have to look up if I could understand what he was saying. He has a great sense of humor and always gets a chuckle when I tell him that I have no idea what he said. This time, it was the computer grading him and he didn’t do very well.