YouGlish: A Great Resource for Authentic Speech and Pronunciation Practice

YouGlish is a website that instantly provides hundreds of clips of authentic speech of any English word or phrase of your choice. It has endless possibilities for the ways it could be used to improve listening comprehension and pronunciation.

How to generate a playlist with the target word or phrase

Go to youglish.com. At the top of the screen, type the target word or phrase in the white box. Put phrases in quotation marks. Press enter or click on “Say it!”

Select the English accent you want. For most of our readers this will be “US” for an American English accent.

Listen to the examples. Skip to the next one using the next button.

Note that a live transcript of the audio appears below the video with the target language highlighted in yellow. 

Ways to use YouGlish in the classroom

Lexical bundle identification and pronunciation

1. Make a list of several common lexical bundles (ie “I want to,” “Let me give you an example,” “I don’t know,” “What do you think?” “going to be,” etc). You may find some in your current reading or an audio text you are using in class. 
2. Without telling learners the lexical bundles, play a playlist of one of them and see if they can pick out the repeated phrase. You could have them call it out, write it down or select it from a list you've prepared. 
3. After learners identify the phrase, play the playlist again, pausing to allow learners to try to repeat it the same way it was said. 

(Adapted from an activity by Valeria Bogorevich and Elnaz Kia in Listening in the Classroom: Teaching Students How to Listen by Marnie Reed and Tamara Jones)

New vocabulary pronunciation practice

After learners have a solid understanding of a list of new vocabulary words, have them work in pairs to type the words into YouGlish and repeat them after they hear them in the playlist. The replay button will come in handy for learners to easily hear the word repeated. Some videos will provide visual support for the meaning of the word.

Vocabulary definition discovery 

1. Provide learners with a list of six to eight new vocabulary words along with mixed up definitions to match them to. 
2. Have them type the words into YouGlish and then guess which meaning to match the word based on the context in the videos. This is best for intermediate to advanced learners. 

What other ideas can you think of? 

For questions or comments about this Tutor Tip, contact Tutor Training Coordinator, Meghan Boyle at mboyle@literacymn.org.