This week, I am introducing you a tool that is helpful for language learners to practice their listening and speaking skills. It is Acapela Group.
The major feature of this website is to provide authentic speech on personalized contexts input by users. As it is straightforward and user-friendly, basically the only thing that one has to do is to scroll down the screen to the content box, type sentences, and press the play button.
Although the speech voice on Acapela Group is claimed to be authentic human voice, it is actually a kind of digital voice created by synthesizing technology. Notwithstanding that, to me it resembles real human voice to a great extent. Listening carefully, users may find some subtle unnatural patterns of the speech, but for language learners, it makes a great tool for speech demonstration.
Another great feature of Acapela Group is that it supports more than 30 languages. Also there are different voices to choose from: male, female, or varying emotive voices.
After testing the speech with two of my familiar languages, Mandarin and English, and two languages that I have learned for at least one year, Korean and German, to my ears, the most naturally produced one is English. The other three are also very clear but feel slightly more robotic.
For language instructors, there are some other features available for teaching such as rail, airport, weather, and car traffic. These can also be explored by students on their own despite the fact that some features require monthly fee.
In short, I consider Acapela Group highly useful for language learners, since in real life, they may have difficulties producing correct sentences in various situations, and Acapela Group is a good way to rehearse the sentences that they know they are going to use. The quick and real-time response is beneficial for learners when they are out of the classroom and fall short of sources that can demonstrate the native-like speech to them.
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