Phonetics at WordWorld

            The WordWorld program is a new technological tool that helps teachers to teach their students in different aspects such as the phonetic ones. Knowing these aspects and how the program can be used by teachers are important. Also, methods of teaching like phonics are used in this program, making it a very good tool for teaching. Another fact is that, it can be applied in the future at the classrooms changing the traditional way to teach. So, it is a tool that can be useful, and it is good idea learning about it to take advantage of it.

           As we know, Phonetics studies the sounds of the human speech, such as the physical production, the acoustic transmission and also perception of the sounds of speech. And, what this program did was to create a new and an easy way to teach people to learn how to pronounce the words. Taking into account these facts, teachers can use it as a resource to practice after explaining how the sounds are made in our speech apparatus. Also, at the same time that students are practicing, they are developing their listening skill that is important at the moment to recognize words for repetition; also they are obtaining more vocabulary to improve their speech and the way that they can express themselves.

            One of the methods that are used in the program is the phonics that use the phonemic awareness, the reading and writing skills in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling form that represent them. The idea of this method is to read a word, spell and then pronounce it. For example, we can find at the videos that were posted, that the characters start with the spelling of a word like T-R-U-C-K, then they put together all the letters to build the word "TRUCK", after that they pronounce each sound of the word, and finally they pronounce all the word. So, these skills are related between them and show the relation that letters and sounds have. Also they show that in order to pronounce a word, we first need to know how to write it.

            Be applying tools like this at classrooms to improve the knowledge of the students in order for them to be able to speak English in a high level is going to be a big change of traditional way to teach that for example in high school where most of the teachers do not care about the pronunciation of the words. Another reason for applying this program at classrooms is that for most students phonetics and phonics are easier to learn if they are having fun. Also, through this tool, students will develop the ability to recognize, identify and manipulate the sequence of sounds represented in words.

            Finally, we can notice, as future English teachers, that it is a good resource to make lessons more interesting and it helps students to practice the sounds. Also, if we take advantages of it, the way that we are going to teach, it is going be easier. It is going to be helpful for students, too, because they are going to have a tool that they can look for on the internet or maybe have it in their cell phones and practiced in every moment by themselves or with a friend. For the moment, it is not a bad idea to practice with these resources, study it and build some words to begin.