The Use of Voicethread and Genial.ly as a Source of Interactive Material and Infographics for Pronunciation Practice and Phonemic Dictation

Abstract

Second and foreign language learning underwent an array of changes stemming from emerging methods, approaches, and techniques in the last century. However, in the past two decades, changes have taken place at a much faster pace and in a much more disruptive manner within the digital age. The notion of Web 2.0, coined by O’Reilly (2005, cited in Alameen, 2001, p. 355), describes it as a “collaborative environment where users have the opportunity to contribute to growing collective knowledge, assist in the development of web-based tools, and participate in online communities”. Besides and beyond its potential for the collaborative advancement of knowledge and the establishment of online networking, one of the most notable features in Web 2.0, and actually its primary contribution, is the hypermedia structure, with its underlying functionalities of interactivity and multimedia. 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 and motivating students in the pronunciation classroom. 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. The aim of this study is to explore the potential features that two interactive multimedia applications –Genia.ly and Voicethread– may contribute to our lessons in pronunciation training at university level, by allowing teachers and students to create their own interactive multimedia materials with a focus on the design of engaging and motivating tasks to practise phonemic transcription from dictation.