Free promo codes for Cambridge's Phonetic Focus app available

The very kind people at Cambridge Online have given me ten free promo codes for their latest iphone/ipod touch/ipad app Phonetics Focus to give away. These are only for the US itunes store (unfortunately) so you’ll have to have an account there to take advantage of it. I’ll do it like this: the first ten people to comment on this blog post will get one of the promo codes so you can download the app for free (retail price in the UK is £1.19, so I’m assuming it’s about $2 in the US store).

I don’t have a US account so I actually had to buy the app myself (!) but I didn’t mind. The app is based on the Cambridge website of the same name and is a website that I have been recommending to my students for months now to help them with their English pronunciation. There’s loads of great games and activities to do on the website, versions of hangman, matching, mazes, pelmanism.

The iphone/ipod touch app is a pared down version of what’s on the website, but it’s still the best ESL/EFL pronunciation app out there. There are four sections in the app:

The first section is the whole phonemic chart, you can click on the symbols and hear the sound.

The second section is simply an illustrated poster of the phonemic chart, showing the sound, a word containing it and a picture of the word. It’s a shame that there’s no interactive element here, it would have been useful to be able to click the words and hear them. The one useful thing you can do here is take a snapshot of certain parts of the poster using the camera icon on the page. 

However, the next section does give you those words from the poster on individual pages for you to click and hear. 

The last section is a short quiz section where you listen to two similar phonemes and have to choose the correct one.

The app isn’t as fully featured as the website (which is a shame) but it’s still one of the best EFL/ESL apps out there. I haven’t been impressed by the quality of ESL apps on the market, it’s mainly unexciting vocab list/quiz apps so it’s encouraging to see companies like Cambridge begin to release stuff which is a bit slicker and a bit more involved. Hope to see it continue.

So, anyhow, add your comments below and the first ten get the promo code to download for free.

Video review of flashcard apps for ipad and iphone

In my previous post I had a look at some of the flashcard apps available for the Android platform to help ESL students revise vocabulary. I've also now done a shortish video review of a couple of similar apps available for the ipad and iphone. The review itself was done on the ipad as I don't actually own an iphone but these apps are or will be available on both devices. I looked at Flashcards Deluxe Lite and Flashcards Plus and at the end I also created a short clip about the Quizlet website.

Byki language learning apps for the iphone

I've been searching around to see what kinds of language learning applications are available for different phones. Byki have developed an app for the iphone which helps learners study a variety of languages and English of course is one of them, though specifically designed for speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish who are learning English). 

I haven't had a chance to try out the app as I don't have an iphone, but there are a couple of interesting things to note about it. First, some of the content is user generated, they have vocabulary lists/lessons added to their server from users for others to download. Nice idea.

Secondly, the the design of the software is informed by certain views on language learning that could be broadly described as lexical. That is, we learn languages by 'chunking' common fixed phrases together and our focus is much more on vocabulary rather than on learning the abstract rules of grammar. Whether that's true or not is highly debatable, but it is interesting to read the theoretical underpinnings of the software and to see something that is not purely phrasebook software. You can read more about their theoretical background here.

They do have a desktop version of the their software as well. I downloaded the trial version but couldn't get it to work on my computer. So, doesn't seem I'm in any position to evaluate whether the Byki software is any damn good or not, but I am intrigued by it and would be interested to hear if anyone has tried it out and what they thought of it. This video takes you through some of the features and I like the slow down option for pronunciation, but would like to hear real user stories with this.