130 visualized instruction videos, pronunciation combat through treasure-hunting games, a methodical route for beginners, scientific academic principles, the application of artificial intelligence to track each phoneme, all of these are the distinctive features learners will get only when experiencing GOGA Pronun.
The English learning application GOGA is built based on collecting and researching common pronunciation practice problems of Southeast Asian learners in general and Vietnam in particular, that other English courses on the market could not fully resolve.
This article will analyze in depth the 5 advantages of GOGA Pronun from an academic perspective, helping you understand more about the urgent needs of today’s English pronunciation learners, and how GOGA Pronun addresses them.
Structured learning route for beginners
In fact, many programs and English pronunciation apps today only provide a store of practice lessons for learners, or just include bits of pronunciation instructions without a scheduled learning journey.
An effective pronunciation training course will definitely need to follow 40 sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) of American English or 44 sounds in the British English IPA. This is also the basic knowledge that every learner needs to grasp when starting their journey to master communicative English. The IPA chart will explain the correct pronunciation of each word, and why there are words that are spelled similarly but pronounced differently.
The average time that most pronunciation courses spend to ensure students master the IPA is from 2 to 3 months. With GOGA Pronun, it takes only 1 month.
Applying pronunciation principles and techniques to reduce study time
GOGA Pronun’s lesson plan is based on 3 core principles:
The first is the 80/20 Principle, a well-known performance enhancement method that is applied to operational programs, business models, and classroom models. The 80/20 Principle points to the fact that 80% of results are often produced by only 20% of effort. More specifically, in most cases, 80% of a business’ revenue is contributed by its 20% core employees, 80% of your work performance is usually produced by your most focused 20% time.
Applying to learning pronunciation, GOGA Pronun’s learning material development experts identify from the IPA chart a group of 8 core sounds. These 8 sounds have typical mouth shapes, so that when learners focus on them, they use it as the leverage to master the remaining 80% more easily and quickly.
The second is the 3-Stage Technique. This technique specializes in single sound practice. Learners will need to watch oral instruction videos from native teachers, then hold the sound in periods of 3 seconds, 1 second, and natural speed. This technique is expected to make learners feel clearly how the lips, tongue, and larynx work for each sound, helping them break the habit of speaking English like Vietnamese.
The third is Sharpening Technique. This is an in-depth technique to correct intonation. Learners will be guided on how to raise and lower the tone for each sound in a complete sentence, making their English voice more natural.
Visualized tutorial videos
In fact, most of today’s popular English speaking practice apps are for students who have mastered basic communication and seek to have a more “Western standard” tone. These apps can integrate speech recognition with artificial intelligence to score learners’ pronunciation standards, but don’t have specific instructions on how to pronounce those sounds. In other words, these apps are about practice for those who have mastered the basics, and lack tutorials for the beginners.
GOGA Pronun introduces a set of 103 videos showing how to read 40 American English IPA sounds by native teachers. The videos will guide mouth shape, how to place the tongue, use breath, control laryngeal vibration, illustrated by native teachers from a multi-angle screen.
The program aims to provide solutions for both audiences: beginners, and learners who already have a basic pronunciation background, but still make mistakes and are not 100% sure about their speaking skill.
Artificial intelligence scores to each phoneme
Since the launch of Elsa Speak in 2018 as the first app to apply artificial intelligence to pronunciation scoring, the Vietnamese market has seen many other applications introducing the similar feature. However, almost 90% of these programs, even if the advertising is somewhat exaggerated, are only measured to the word unit. At this level, as long as the user says the right word, without pronouncing it correctly, the system will automatically mark it as good enough.
GOGA Pronun’s AI system is different. Specially designed for speech scoring purposes, the system can measure pronunciation to the level of phoneme accuracy. GOGA Pronun AI is trained based on nearly 10,000 hours of high-quality data of native speakers set as a standard base, from which it can compare the “similarity” in pronunciation of simple, long, and short sentences of learners.
Up to the time of final phase delivery, GOGA’s AI system has achieved an accuracy of 97%, this scale will continue to be improved and improved based on user data.
Learn through treasure-hunting games
The main audience that GOGA Pronun targets are people who have forgotten their basics or are just starting out. One of the biggest common problems with these groups is that they get frustrated quickly and give up easily. A well-structured route can help them master English and achieve their desired goals, but the major obstacle remains how to maintain their motivation until then.
GOGA found the answer to that problem through Gamification. This is one of the biggest differences of GOGA from other academic apps on the market. The learning journey is gamified into treasure-hunting missions, with attractive virtual items. In GOGA, each student will have their own journey, where they play the role of a hero who saves the world through a learning mission. Learners will also have the opportunity to interact through the pronunciation competition playground, accumulate more points and treasures, and evaluate the results of their pronunciation practice.
GOGA Pronun is an upgraded version available on the GOGA app (launched on January 15 on iOS and Google Play). Download the app to have your own experience today.
