As a teacher, I always appreciate new tools which help me create materials and teach in new ways. With that in mind, I’ve created this list of useful tools
Programs for writing and searching phonemic script
/fəˈni:mɪk/ Script Typewriter 1.7
Phonemicchart.com This is a great tool that I have used for some time. Unfortunately there now seems to be some security issue with the site, so I’m hoping this gets sorted soon.
https://westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard/
toPhonetics – an online tool for converting English text to IPA phonetic script. It allows you to choose between British and American pronunciation.
Lexilogos multilingual IPA Keyboard
Rhyme Desk Search for words by sound, rather than spelling. Great for finding minimal pairs and creating pronunciation activities.
Corpus analysis tools
Linguee is an online multilingual tool which allows you to compare sentence pairs in different languages. For example, you can input a phrase or word in Linguee and find real sentences found by Linguee in English (or another language) which contain that word or phrase. This shows you how the word is used and provides in-context translations into another language. Linguee sources the sentence pairs from bilingual online texts, so as a result, unlike machine translators, it is a memory translation tool providing translations which are usually human translations.
Ludwig is a search engine which will search online for real sentences in context for a given word or phrase. For example, if you do a search in Ludwig for articulate argument, it will find real examples of these two words used together.
The free dictionary has a number of tools including dictionaries, a thesaurus and specialist dictionaries. The most useful tool for me is the ability to look up words that begin or end with particular strings of letters.
Word Finder seems to have been designed for Scrabble players, but I find it useful to find words containing letter strings. For example, I can search for words beginning with proto-, words containing –plan-or ending with -able. Words are grouped according to the number of letters in the word.
www.wordhippo.com has a number of tools, including a wordfinder which allows you to search for word beginnings, endings and words containing a particular string. For example, I might use this search: https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/words-ending-with/ate.html to find words ending in –ate.
www.wordexample.com is a website which allows you to search for words ending in X, starting with X. I especially like the fact that I can use it to search for words with particular sounds by typing search terms such as “Words containing schwa” or “words containing /ʒ/. Unfortunately, the search feature has its weaknesses as a search for /ʒ/ will also produce results for /dʒ/. Search results can be downloaded as a .csv file (which can be opened in Excel). The site also has this advanced search box, permitting more sophisticated searches.
www.rhymedesk.com/phonemes is a very useful tool for making pronunciation activities as it also does searches for sounds from the phonemic chart. It has a phonemic keyboard, making searches very simple to perform. There are other useful tools on the site, including a tool to find words rhyming with a particular word and a rhyming word worksheet generator.
https://www.dcode.fr/words-ending-with will do searches for words ending in a letter string and also has options for searching beginnings and words containing word strings anywhere ( for example, such.
Rhyme Desk Search for words by sound, rather than spelling. Great for finding minimal pairs and creating pronunciation activities.
Tools for creating activities
Puzzlemaker allows you to create a number of different sorts of puzzles, including word searches, crossword puzzles and others.
The teacher’s corner cloze maker
Random Idea English Teacher tools
CLOZEit (Google Docs add-in)