Pronunciation practice for kids learning English
A learner says an English word into the mic and sees how each sound went: which sound slipped, what it sounded like instead, and a tip for the next try. Made for children learning English, and for the teachers, tutors and SLPs who work with them.
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Target: TH /θ/ · beginning
thinkNearly there!
The /θ/ sounded like /s/, so “think” came out close to “sink”.
/θ/
38
heard /s/
/ɪ/
93
on target
/ŋ/
90
on target
/k/
96
on target
Tip: Rest the tip of your tongue lightly between your teeth and blow air gently over it.
What learners use
Practice that tells you which sound to work on
Four parts of SpeechTherapyMagic do most of the work for English learners.
Pronunciation practice
Games
Word lists by sound
Card decks
Why some sounds are harder
English sounds that often differ from a learner's first language
Every language uses its own set of sounds. When English has a sound the first language does not, learners tend to use the nearest familiar one. That is a normal part of learning, and it is exactly where focused practice helps.
Uncommon across the world's languages, so learners from many backgrounds use a close neighbour such as t, d, s, z or f. In our own benchmark recordings of Mandarin-speaking children reading English, “th” coming out as another sound was one of the recurring patterns.
R is made in very different ways across languages: tapped, trilled or made at the back of the mouth. The English r, and the r inside vowels as in car and bird, often takes longer to settle.
Some languages, Japanese for example, do not treat English l and r as two separate sounds, so pairs like light and right can be hard to hear apart before they are easy to say apart.
Most varieties of Spanish do not distinguish b and v the way English does, so very and berry can sound the same to a learner at first.
Languages that end syllables in few consonants, Mandarin among them, make word-final sounds and clusters easy to drop or soften. Final-consonant deletion also showed up in our benchmark recordings.
Plenty of languages have s but no z, or do not use the voiced–voiceless difference to tell words apart at the end of a word, as English does in eyes and ice.
These are common tendencies, not predictions: learners vary with their first language and its dialect, their age, and how long and how much they have heard English. For the sounds each language uses, see ASHA's phonemic inventories across languages.
A note for teachers, tutors and parents
Who it's for
Learners, and the adults who help them
ESL and ELL teachers
Tutors
SLPs with bilingual caseloads
What the scoring is built on
Every score comes from ArticScore, the pronunciation engine we built and fine-tuned on children's speech. The public recordings we publish its accuracy on, the speechocean762 corpus, are of Mandarin-speaking children aged 6 to 15 reading English aloud, so children learning English are the group our published numbers actually describe. They are our own measurements, with their limits stated, on the benchmark page.
SpeechTherapyMagic is developed by our team with our clinical lead, Lori B. Levy, M.A., CCC-SLP. Building an English-learning app of your own? The same engine is available as an API: see ArticScore for English-learning apps.
Questions about English learners
Is SpeechTherapyMagic an ESL curriculum?
Will it mark a learner's accent as wrong?
Who is it for?
Which English does it use?
What does it cost?
Can it tell me whether a child has a speech disorder?
Start with one sound
Create a free account, pick a sound your learner finds tricky, and play the free games straight away.
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