The use of Voicethread and Genial.ly as a source of interactive material and infographics for pronunciation practice and phonemic dictation

Mar del Plata

Jornada; V Jornadas Internacionales de Fonética y Fonología y I Jornadas Nacionales de Fonología y Discurso; 2017

Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata

In the last few decades, the advances in technology, especially in the realm of ICT, have helped widen the opportunities for language teaching and learning, while naturally expanding creative possibilities which can be maximised by means of easy-to- use and free online interactive resources. The teaching of pronunciation, which has allegedly and systematically been neglected as the Cinderella of language teaching (Underhill, 2005), has actually been one of the most benefited areas by this growth. The use of Open Educational Resources (Geith & Vignare, 2008), as is the case of Voicethread and interactive infographics generating online software like Genial.ly, can be of great advantage at the time of fostering creative skills in the pronunciation classroom. This paper takes a look into the implementation of Voicethread and Genial.ly in the production of audiovisual material and multimedia interactive infographics by students of teaching training courses in Córdoba. The project currently underway, which involves a team of student-helpers and teacher-trainees, relies on principles of mashup and fanfic (Knobel & Lankshear, 2011) to collaboratively remix classical tales as a source of pronunciation practice and pronunciation modelling in the context of a core subject in the teacher-training and translation majors in Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2011). Remix: la nueva escritura popular. Cuadernos Comillas (1), 105-126. Underhill, A. (2005). Sound foundations: Learning and teaching pronunciation (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Macmillan.