EFL teaching

This is currently the main focus for S4 phonetics but it has many other applications.

It is to be noted that young learners can easily pick up the phonemes of English. Later, it is more difficult.
This video shows a young French boy learning.

And this video shows how a foreign student can read-off S4 phonetic text and produce very convincing English speech.

S4 levels the playing field

for teachers of pronunciation as is provides a way of objectively determining whether a teacher effectively knows how to recognize and accurately pronounce the sounds of mainstream American and British speech. Not every native speaker can do it, and not every non-native speaker cannot.

Accent coaching

Teaching how to:

• become aware of non-mainstream aspects of speech,
• move between British and American accents,
• pronounce nearly perfectly, for non-native speaker actors and singers.

Book a trial lesson now.

Academic research

A corpus of transcribed natural speech can be built up and used for linguistic analytics. S4 is written in a very rigorous manner using text-to-sound for checking. This makes it very consistent and suitable for compiling reliable source material.

Infotainment

Film clips can be sub-titled in S4 to learn English, Karaoke-style:

Books and plays

Books can be written in S4 phonetic text, here is a selection of the books I have written in S4.

There is a wide range of books that could profitably be transcribed into S4 phonetics, from Shakespeare to the latest best-sellers. When you get used to it, reading phonetic material is a rich and enjoyable experience.

Roadsigns

English spelling can be hard to figure out, explanations can be helpful. Here is a suggestion.

When accurate communication is vital

In healthcare, for instance, misunderstandings can be fatal. Healthcare workers need to be able to clearly understand and be understood. S4 provides a strong spoken-language training framework for the non-native speaker.

Here is an example of a list of healthcare vocabulary with phonetic text to show the proper pronunciation (taken from here).  Every non-native healthcare worker in every English-speaking country needs to be be able to read in phonetic text, speak and understand the actual sounds of English.

word part of speech	meaning	example sentence
abnormal adj æbnoom‛l	not normal for the human body	This amount of weight loss is abnormal for women your age. ðiiy əmau‛nt əv weit los iz æbnoom‛l fə wi‛min əv yoor eidʒ
ache noun/verb eik	pain that won't go away	I can't sleep because my knees ache in the night. ai kaa‛nt sliip  bikoz mai niiz eik i‛n ðə nait
acute adj əkyuut	quick to become severe/bad	We knew the baby was coming right away because the woman's labour pains were acute. wii nyuu ðə beibii wəz ka‛miŋ rait əwei  bikoz ðə wu‛m‛nz pei‛nz wəər əkyuut
allergy æ‛lədʒii noun allergic adj ələədʒik	a body's abnormal reaction to certain foods or environmental substances (e.g. causes a rash)	Your son is extremely allergic to peanuts. yoo san iz ikstrii‛mlii ələədʒik tə piinuts

Phonetic text is the key to effective Oracy

Oracy refers to the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically in speech. It encompasses skills like speaking, listening, communication, and the ability engage in effective dialogue. Speech consists of uttering strings of characteristic sounds with appropriate emphasis, and so pronunciation skills are fundamental part of Oracy. Oracy is being promoted by the Oracy Communication Commission in the UK.

There is an unpleasant feature of British society that Oracy could resolve. If there is one thing that divides people in English society, that is accent, class accent. As soon as words are exchanged, both know the other's social class, immediately. This does not happen in the same way in French for example. Children need to be taught at school to speak with any accent they chose and switch without hesitation. This is easy if you know phonetics.

Mainstream American and British speech consists of the 46 sounds covered in this document. Using the information here, you can learn to correctly speak both dialects (as well as posh and working-class British English with a small number of extra sounds, like the Posh-O, the Dark-W and the Cockney-O). It can be used as a tool ensure objective understanding of the sounds of English and skill in using them, and put an end to class accents.

I have lived in France since I was a student and I speak fluent French. There is one thing that a really appreciate about this: I don't get stereotyped as soon as I open my mouth, and I don't need to send my children to an eye-wateringly expensive public school so that they can get an upperclass English accent. I rather hope that learning S4 phonetics at school in England will enable people to speak without a class accent, like they do in France. I can say from personal experience that speaking with a non-mainstream accent puts you straight in the outgroup.

On the horizon

S4 phonetic text can be converted directly into sound by a computer, I use this possibility to write the S4 phonetic text that I produce, using an application that I have written. This can be seen in the following picture.

You can download this application here (as a compressed Windows file-set for a functional development version), or here as a Macintosh version (works a bit better!).



When application is open, as you type on the keyboard of your computer, the keystrokes are converted in accordance with the layout on the bottom left of the picture, or you can click on the virtual keys that are visible with the same effect. The text you type-in appears in the white field on the lefthand side. To check it, you can press the button marked "Hear" at the top lefthand side, you can then hear the phonetic text played back, as a string of phonemes. If it sounds OK, you can press the returnkey and the text is moved to the righthand field marked "Hold" from where it can be called back to the lefthand side for editing, or saved as a S4 (or IPA) text of HTML format for later use. Very effective ! I am now working on a webpage version of this application that anyone can use. There is one thing that this application conclusively proves: speech consists of strings of phonemes.

Conversely, AI would enable speech to be converted directly into phonetic text: if a human can, then AI can do it better. If you built up a corpus of speech recordings and the corresponding phonetic text, you could use it to train an AI system and so make it possible to to take audiobooks and the corresponding text and automatically align them. In this way you could create a knowledge base of the actual pronunciation of a gigantic array of words.

Also, AI could be used for teaching on line, checking and assisting students in learning to pronounce English an a useful mainstream manner. This would be highly cost-effective.

And last but not least, the reduced character-set of S4 nicely fits the virtual keyboard of a smart phone, and could be used (as in typing Chinese characters on a phone) to bring up conventional spelling as phonetic spelling is typed in, on-the-fly.