Teaching the alphabet in a new language is very important for language learners, particularly for true beginners. With Speakable, you can help your students learn this quickly, in context. There are many ways to do it; here are some ideas to give your students productive and fun activities to learn the alphabet.

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Repeat activities:

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Repeat activities are a great way to teach the alphabet, but we don’t recommend simply adding the letter as the sole content of the Repeat student action. Adding the letter with a word in context would help students learn the letter and start using it from the get go. Additionally this would allow voice recognition systems to get the information more accurately. Just using the letter “C” in the repeat card can lead the voice recognition to identify the sound as “Sea”, which would not lead to a successful score. Because of this, Speakable will label the prompt as “Not recommended for use”. There are ways to avoid this, however.

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Instead, try a sentence like: “C is for Coconut” or “Coconut is written with a C”. This will give your computer’s voice recognition system enough context to determine that what you are saying is indeed “C” and not “Sea”. The label will change to “Verified” when you test the Repeat activity. It would also be helpful to add a picture to one of the side Media panels to give your students that extra context:

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Respond Activities:

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You could also set up an Alphabet activity by focusing on Respond. Create an activity where the prompt is “Please say the alphabet in order” and Speakable will take it from there. Adding context on the sides is also a good idea if you want to give your students more context or if you want to focus solely on pronunciation. If the students made a mistake or mispronounced a letter, this will be picked up by our AI, which will provide the student with appropriate feedback:

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The best approach would be to combine both activity types. You could even throw in multiple choice questions if you'd like! That way your students will have the space to repeat the correct content and also be tested on their ability to do it themselves. Repeat and Respond work very well in tandem to make sure student participation is constant and that they learn actively, participating in the process. After all, learning a language is just like learning other skills. Active practice is essential!

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Do you want to try this for yourself? Try this activity! You can duplicate it, edit it, change the language or add custom media. Feel free to make it your own!

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