[6th] YouGlish——a new dictionary?

How to help students pronounce one word or one phrase?

Tell them directly? This may not be efficient, especially since only one student asks you.

Tell them in class or advise them to check in the dictionary? Students may forget quickly and cannot hear the pronunciation in a real-life situation.

Then, what should we do? Use the tool YouGlish will be a choice!!!

Want to explore more about this tool? Click this link: https://youglish.com.

1.       What is YouGlish.

YouGlish is a website using YouTube to improve English pronunciation and offering 100M tracks, where audiences can practice pronunciation by seeing how English is spoken by real people and in a natural context.

I will show how to check the phrase [not at all] as an example.

👉 Choose the accent like ‘US, UK’ etc.

👉 Type the phrase ‘not at all’ in the search bar and click ‘say it’.

👉Click the play button of one video to hear how it is pronounced, and the headline also shows the number of videos you can choose. Here there are 31306 videos available for you to hear.

👉  See the sentence below the video to make you hear it more clearly.

👉  Use the button below the video where you can go back five seconds, play again, skip to the next video or adjust the speed of the video.

👉  See the definition and tips for pronunciation below the video to enhance the pronunciation.  

2.       How is it relevant to language teaching?

The most functional usage is from phonetic enhancement to help students find the pronunciation and how it is spoken in English in a natural context. In that case, students may also explore how to pronounce a single word in a phrase or a sentence and improve the stress, rhythm and intonation on a holistic level. To sum up, it mainly offers assistance for students’ speaking skills.

3.       Advantages:

👼  The websites offer different accents, including the US, UK, Australia etc.

👼 The video stops right at the part where the words are being spoken, which is very convenient.

👼  It is fast that learners do not need to log in to search.

4.       Disadvantages

👿  Tips for each word’s pronunciation are the same.

There have no concrete suggestions for a particular pronunciation like liaison etc. The tips below show the suggestions of ‘not at all’ and ‘plain’, which are the same.

👿  Words in different places of the sentences may sound different.

Phrases placed in the middle of a sentence or at the end of a sentence may differ from sound, especially for the intonation, which may confuse the learners. The website could give more guidance about why people speak in that way.

👿  Not mention the pouncing principles in advance but only present the sounds.

It would be better to explain the reason for pouncing that way and then give an example. Only giving examples from videos may increase students’ difficulty finding the pronouncing principles.

5.       Application in my context

👀  Use it as a tool to teach pronunciation.

Firstly, teachers could give students more phrases that contain one pronunciation skill, such as liaison, and ask students to search at YouGlish to find how to pronounce it. After finding all phrases’ pronunciations, teachers could ask students whether they discover some similarities in how to pronounce them. In that way, students could use deductive the pronouncing principles through searching. Finally, teachers elicit the principle from students’ discoveries and teach them about this principle. After class, teachers could also assign the homework like requiring students to find more phrases about the principle taught in class.  

👀  Use it as an advanced 'dictionary’ to help students find the pronunciation.

Students could use it as an advanced ‘dictionary’ offering real context and definition of the word and phrases. Students could not use it as the primary tool to improve their pronunciation still lies to the failure of giving the pronunciation guidance and principles. Otherwise, students need to spend a lot of time discovering the principles.