Text-to-Speech Activities to Teach Speaking and Pronunciation

by Amany AlKhayat |

This is an activity that I presented in TESOL's EV Fair in 2011. It includes the use of Text-to-Speech websites to improve the students' pronunciation or speaking skill.

Audience: Elementary, Secondary, Adult, University, Teacher Training

Audience Language Proficiency: Beginner, Intermediate

Duration: 50 minutes

Objective:

By the end of this lesson, the students will be able to:

  1. know how to use text-to-speech software
  2. create their own avatars and choose their preferable accent e.g., American English, British English
  3. Evaluate the resulting speech by software i.e. Exclamatory sentences, interrogative sentences....etc.
  4. Evaluate different tones and stress in sentences

Activity Description: There are many wesites that the teacher can use as follows:
1- http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=es
2- http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php
3- http://www.voki.com/create.php

The teacher can start with Vozme to show the students how it works and can ask them to write two sentences describing one of their colleagues. The example can be like the following: "My friend wears a blue T-shirt. She is also wearing glasses". The teacher can choose 5 students and can type their sentences one by one on Vozme. Once she hits 'Create mp3', the students will listen to the sentences.
A discussion is to be conducted after this activity to illicit some information from the students regarding stress and tone. Then, the teacher should move to a similar activity in which the students use VOKI. VOKI is a website by which a user can create his/her own avatar, make it talk by either typing or recoring few sentences and then post it on a website. 
The teachers can ask the students to create their own avatars which will introduce, direct, or ask  readers who visit the university's website about certain information.
Once the students create the avatars that speaks, the teacher should illicit information from the students concerning the pronunciation, tone and stress. The students should try to imitate the avatar to produce a near native accent.

Useful Link:

 http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=es
 http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php
 http://www.voki.com/create.php

TESOL Interest Section: Computer-Assisted Language Learning

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