The Center for Teaching Excellence’s English Language Proficiency (CTE-ELP) program has recreated and improved the Pronunciation Highlighter, unveiling the tool at the 2023 international convention for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). This digital tool is now freely available online to learners and teachers of English around the world at https://seeitsayit.tamu.edu and https://pronounce.tamu.edu.
Speaking at a session during the convention, former CTE Assistant Director Brandon Cooper and Computer Science graduate student Adharvan Sai Jakkula noted the enhanced capabilities of the Highlighter and tested it against ChatGPT in front of a live audience. Both were pleased that the upgraded Highlighter outperformed the much-hyped generative AI - at least for now.
This tool addresses a familiar problem for many teachers: English spelling doesn’t perfectly correspond to pronunciation. For example, a learner of English who is working to improve their pronunciation of the /z/ sound might be unaware of “hidden” instances of the /z/ sound in words such as “has” and “easy” and may pronounce them, mistakenly, with an /s/ sound, as they are spelled. The situation is even more perplexing for vowels where a single vowel sound might be represented in writing a half-dozen different ways. With the Pronunciation Highlighter, anyone can input any text of their choice and select any consonant or vowel sound, and with the click of a button, instantly see which words contain that sound.
English learners can then rehearse the correct pronunciation to be prepared for an upcoming conversation or presentation. Teachers of English can use this tool to create lesson materials targeting the sounds that their students find challenging.
The original Pronunciation Highlighter was conceived and built by Dr. Monica (Richards) Ghosh. It ceased to work, so with Ghosh’s permission, the CTE-ELP team restored its original functionality. Cooper and Sai Jakkula worked together with CTE Senior Instructional Consultant Ginessa Lawson Payne on this project, supported by funding from the Marie M. and James H. Galloway Foundation. The Pronunciation Highlighter - Classic once again highlights each word that contains the target sound. For example, a search for the /z/ sound will highlight the entire word “has.”
More significantly, the CTE-ELP team worked to add novel functionality to this tool. Through a complicated orthographic mapping process, the new Pronunciation Highlighter - Advanced now highlights only the letters that represent a sound. Using the same example, the Pronunciation Highlighter Advanced highlights only the letter “s” in the word “has” when the user searches for the /z/ sound. This makes the sound’s location within a word more apparent. In a word like “rescues,” the second letter “s” is pronounced like a /z/, but the first one is not, so the precision of the Pronunciation Highlighter - Advanced is helpful. “We know of no other tool that does this and is freely available to the public,” said Payne.
The CTE-ELP developed this tool to supplement their program, which provides linguistic support to faculty and teaching assistants who speak English as a Second Language. The Pronunciation Highlighter also has potential applications for ESL teachers in K-12, tutors, developers of educational materials such as textbooks, speech-language pathologists, literacy educators, students of linguistics, and of course English language learners anywhere.
Payne suggested some applications of this tool in her virtual presentation at TESOL 2023:
- international teaching assistants preparing lectures to give in U.S. universities;
- language arts teachers presenting poetry that rhymes;
- elementary school teachers introducing basic vocabulary to English-learning children; and
- immigrant adults preparing for a job interview.
Within the first month and a half of publishing, there were 4,820 hits to the Pronunciation Highlighter website. At the same website, other language tools are available in their beta version, such as the StressFinder, which identifies the syllable that gets primary emphasis within a word. This is a powerful feature of American English pronunciation; it distinguishes the word “COmedy” from the word “comMITtee” and is correlated with a speaker’s comprehensibility. The CTE-ELP team plans to resolve bugs, expand the dictionary to include more words, add features, and publicize these tools further.