So, how did it go?
One of the goals I had for this course, was to learn to speak English more comfortably and pronunciation is naturally a big part of that. On a previous post, I said that I had been using two mobile apps, ELSA and Duolingo to focus on speaking specifically. Since ELSA only had a 7-day free trial, I've long stopped using it, but Duolingo has stuck with me the entire course. Now, to give my final review on those two…
When it comes to practising speaking, ELSA is definitely the better option. It offered diverse practices focusing on pronunciation, pacing and emphasizing, and the most interesting ones for me, were the AI conversation practices. In those, you were given a subject that you could then relatively freely discuss with AI responses. I would not go as far as to say that they were equal to normal human conversations, but as practice, I think those were the most useful ones that actually forced me to think.
In the seven days that I used ELSA, I didn't have the time to get to the more advanced programs the app offers, and I also couldn't try some of them because they were behind a paywall. But that's completely understandable and I do not fault the app for that. If I had the money to spare, maybe I would've considered using ELSA for longer.
Duolingo, again, has been interesting to use but as I said in my previous post, it's definitely for casual learning and not so much for academic use. I've advanced quite far in it and it's very easy to put 15 minutes or more into it every day, but it's not challenging. Rather, I'd continue using it just to familiarize myself with casual English. Therefore, I wouldn't say that it's been completely useless for me during this course because as I've been focusing heavily on academic learning, it's been easy to forget that that's not all there is to English.
However, during my second counselling meeting, I expressed some concern that I wouldn't be able to get enough pronunciation practice in with just these two apps – especially with using ELSA only for seven days. My counsellor gave me the idea of simply reading texts – articles, essays, anything really – out loud and practising my pronunciation through that. It sounded simple enough, so I started doing exactly that.
I have not recorded myself because I don't really like listening to my own voice, but I have been reading through some articles and I have found this method somewhat useful. Of course, as there is only the internet to give me feedback on this, it's not possible for me to know if I'm pronouncing everything right but I also don't feel like that's a big problem. Having an accent is completely normal and even native speakers struggle with scientific words that I come across daily in my studies.
Reading out loud has also helped me in other aspects of this course. I've had a lot of reading to do, for my essay and for my Academic Reading support group, so I was able to combine these two tasks and use my time quite well. Lots of the articles and other texts that I read, I could then use for later purposes. One that I especially liked, and even used three times in this course, is David SG Thomas' "Geography needs science, science needs Geography" from 2022. It's full of useful words for me as a geography student and it's just difficult enough that I had to read through it a couple of times to be sure I was pronouncing everything correctly. At the same time, I could also better my understanding of the text.
Of course, I also always read out loud any text I myself produce. By doing that, I'm certain that I can continue to better myself even after this course has ended.