Today’s posting is on the iPad app iPronounce!
AtoZ Studio Private Limited. (2012). iPronounce! (Version 4.0) [Mobile application software]. Retrieved from http://www.itunes.com
Price: $0.99
Main menu for the app iPronounce!
iPronounce! would only download to my iPad, but not to my iPhone. The main menu has four options in colorful puzzle pieces: phonemic charts, let’s study, let’s play, and more. AtoZ Studio Private Limited has another app in the iTunes store called iPronounce (without the exclamation point) that is marketed for both the iPad and the iPhone. This post will focus on iPronounce! (with the exclamation point), but you may see my posting on iPronounce here.
Phonemic Chart. This page includes 12 vowels, 8 diphthongs, and 24 consonants. The sounds and IPA transcriptions are of British sounds. The instructions say “tap and hold to hear the sound and an example word.” If you simply tap the sound symbol, you hear the sound uttered by a native speaker. If you press and hold the symbol, you hear the same sound utterance followed by a sample word read by a computerized voice. The word and an IPA transcription appear at the top of the screen. I found the computerized word readings to be difficult to understand and I fear that learners would have trouble using them as good models. It is confusing why the app developers would use a live native speaker to record all of the sounds, but not the sample words (which are more important because the put the sounds into context).
The phonemic chart for the app iPronounce!
Let’s Study. This section includes more puzzle piece options: vowels, diphthongs, consonants, and home. I tapped on vowels and got to a screen with five words each followed by a speaker icon and the IPA transcription (as it would be pronounced in British English). The arrows at the bottom of the screen allow you to access more screens of words. Tapping on the speaker plays a computerized recording (I identified three different computerized voices) of the word in a more American style pronunciation. As if the use of a computerized voice to model English pronunciation was not bad enough the disconnect between r-less transcriptions (British) matched with rhotic pronunciations (American) was even more jarring (consider Stephen Hawking’s comment in the film The Theory of Everything on the American pronunciation of the computerized voice he was given). I found the same issue with the “long o” sound–the transcription would be /əʊ/ but the pronunciation would be /ow/. The diphthong and consonant “let’s study” screens worked the same way as the vowel screen.
Practice words screen in the app iPronounce!
Let’s Play. This section again presents puzzle piece options, here they are Read the Symbol, Listen, Tap the Word, and More. Once I got to this section, I found that the app kept crashing (multiple times). For the game Read the Symbol you see the IPA transcription of a word and you are supposed to type the word in the white box (you get a maximum of three errors). I could not find an option to listen to the word nor could I find a keyboard to allow me to type in the word (the word was finally read when the timer ran out). This game frustrated me because I could never get it to work. The Listen game also has a non-functioning keyboard. I tried to reload this game multiple time to write more about it, but the app continued to crash on me. In Tap the Word, you hear a computerized recording of a sound and you are instructed to tap on the words floating up that contain that sound. I found hearing the target sound very difficult. As a native speaker I was often confused by which words were correct and which were incorrect. For example, “range” was incorrect for the /n/
Tap the Word game in the app iPronounce!
sound and “support” was incorrect for the /ʌ/ sound (but a learner may not know or hear the difference between /ə/ and /ʌ/ in the first syllable). I fear that a non-native speaker would struggle and become very frustrated (not to mention that the app continually crashes).
More. This final section of the app simply provides instructions for the various parts of the app. “Instructions” may have been a better title for this section.
The focus of this app is the phonemic chart. To help learners, organizing the sounds in a chart that shows where in the mouth they are pronounced could help. These types of charts for both vowels and consonants can be found in many published textbooks. This app provides no practice in hearing consonant and vowels sounds contrasted from other similar sounds. There is also no explicit practice in pronouncing these sounds or words. For younger learners of beginners (who appear to be the target for this app) there is no scaffolding of skills to make the connection between sound and spelling, which is required for the game sections. Pedagogically, this app has not been developed with the needs of an English Language Learner’s language acquisition in mind.
DJ’s Perspective
Aside from consistently crashing, the greatest drawback of this app is using British transcriptions matched with audio clips of a computerized voice using an American variety. With no real practice with the sounds beyond games (of which two out of three do not function), there is little pedagogical value to this app. For a paid app that is already in Version 4.0, a user should be able to expect basic functionality (like a keyboard for games that require you to type your responses) and audio recordings made by a human being.
DJ Kaiser, PhD
djkaiser@webster.edu
Note: Posted evaluations of iOS apps are done from the perspective of a teacher educator and English pronunciation specialist. The intended readers for these posts are English language learners seeking to improve their intelligibility through pronunciation practice and ESL/EFL instructors who may be asked to recommend appropriate resources. The intention of these posts is to help learners and instructors make educated decisions about resources they may use to work on English pronunciation skills. See this post for more.
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