Macmillan Apps

Reviews of Sounds: The Pronunciation App

Posted by Matt, on November, in Reviews, Sounds App

We’ve received two reviews of Sounds: The Pronunciation App and thought we’d share them with you.

Vicky Loras, a teacher and blogger has sent us this about Sounds:

“After trying out the new app by Macmillan ‘Sounds: The Pronunciation App’ on my iPad, I absolutely loved it and found it to be exactly the thing I was looking for… My students can practise recording themselves and also doing quizzes, for which they get instant feedback. the app is super both for work in class and for practice at home.

Many many thanks to everyone at Macmillan – my students will love it, as I already do!”

You can read more from Vicky at http://vickyloras.wordpress .com, or on Twitter @vivkyloras.

Our second review comes from Lindsay Clandfield, who has done a round-up of mobile apps for language learners and teachers on the Global website. Sounds was one of the apps he looked at:

“Sounds is the latest app from Macmillan, and it uses the phonetic chart developed by Adrian Underhill in his book Sound Foundations. The app allows you to choose between American or British pronunciation.

The centrepiece of the app is the chart itself. You press on a sound and hear the sound, if you press for longer you hear a sample word. Just this in itself provided for quite a bit of fun and I can see its use for my trainee teachers who are learning the phonetic chart. In fact, I found that if you swooped your finger across the sounds you could almost make the app say words.

There’s a lot more though. The wordlist has over five hundred words which you can listen to, and record your own pronunciation of. The practice and quiz sections are also very useful. You can select a phoneme or a group of phonemes to practice. Then there are three different possibilities:

Read – you read a word in phonetics and have to type what it is.

Write – you read a word and have to type what it is in phonetics (the phonetics typewriter is cool)

Listen – you hear a word and have to type what it is in phonetics (again with the phonetics typewriter)

In the free version you get the chart and a sample of the tests and practice activities. In the premium version there are more activities, tests and a tips section for teachers and students.

Of all the apps here, this is the one I like the best and I am recommending it to all my students and student teachers.”

If you’d like to submit a review of any of our Apps we’d love to hear from you. Leave us a comment below with your review, or get in touch directly if you’d like at help@macmillan.com.