Monday, December 27, 2010

EnglishCentral

I've just found this website - http://www.englishcentral.com - which has selected videos from YouTube (etc.?), with added transcripts and vocabulary links and speech recognition with feedback on pronunciation.

Learners can:
  • watch the whole video through;
  • listen (and read) line by line, and replay as often as required, even slowing down the speech in each line;
  • get definitions of words through context-specifric links to a dictionary;
  • record themselves speaking the line and get feedback;
  • the website keeps track of a learner's progress, and they can compete against other learners if they want.

Teachers can:
  • set up their own channel, selecting videos for their students;
  • set goals for their students, or not;
  • create student groups;
  • track student progress;
  • take part in the Teacher Forums, for support, ideas and suggestions;
  • make suggestions for videos to be added to EnglishCentral.
It's only in Beta at the moment, but seems to have great potential!  It's all free at the moment, but they are planning to introduce a 'premium' paid service soon.

Most of the videos are American English, I did find one from Australia  - http://www.englishcentral.com/en/player/10376/greetings-nice-to-meet-you (you can view this in the DEMO without registering) -  but the voice recognition seems to be comparing my speech to an American English accent not the one in the video, so I didn't score all that well.  Perhaps if more Australian teachers and learners in Australia started asking, we'd be able to get more content on there.

Still, worth checking out for those learners who want to practice listening and to independently work on their pronunciation skills

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