Streaming Speech – British & Irish version

Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English began life as a CD-ROM in 2002. It became part of then an online service featuring other similar publications from 2003-2010. By 2005 there were four publications in this family: this British/Irish version (the only one to be accompanied by a printed Student’s Book); a USA and Canada version; Accents of the UK; Accents of the USA. The British/Irish version of Streaming Speech won a British Council ELTon for Innovations in Language Teaching in 2004. The success of these publications was largely due to my brilliant technology partner at the time, the late Mike Beilby, who used his own software – Fabris – to make the presentation and learner-tracking systems work under Internet  Explorer.

Streaming Speech featured the spontaneous speech of eight speakers talking about their personal lives. Each of the speakers provided the material for a chapter of work on listening and pronunciation. Having answered a set of three listening comprehension questions, users were then taken to an answer screen, where they could see if they had chosen the correct answers. But crucially they could interact with that part of the recording which gave the information required to answer the each question. The text in green shown here is in a flash movie, and when any line is clicked the relevant part of the original sound file will play.

At the end of each chapter, students can work on identifying and then pronouncing the soundshapes of the vowel and consonant phonemes of British English. In the screenshot you can see a drag-and-drop exercise in which students have to listen to each speech unit, and decide which phonemes match up with which syllables, and drag the symbols to the correct square boxes.

There’s a lot more to Streaming Speech. If you are interested in a demonstration, email me richardcauldwell@me.com