Game category
Sounds, stress, intonation and fluent speech — with AI feedback on recorded speech.
Ship or sheep? Train your ear to tell. Students hear words that differ by a single sound — ship/sheep, bat/bet — and choose what they heard. Systematic contrast training rebuilds the perceptual categories that the native language blurs.
Research basis: Perceptual training of contrasting sound categories is the core mechanism in second-language speech learning models (Best & Tyler 2007).
Hear it, then say it — under pressure. An advanced arena for sound contrasts: students not only distinguish tricky pairs by ear but produce them, with AI checking whether the contrast is audible. Speed and scoring add a competitive edge.
Research basis: Combining perception and production training accelerates phonetic category learning (Flege 1995, Speech Learning Model).
Spot the target sound in the stream of speech. A target sound is announced — then words fly by, and students must catch only the ones containing it. The game sharpens phonemic attention: the ability to hear individual sounds inside whole words.
Research basis: Explicit attention to individual phonemes is a foundation of pronunciation teaching frameworks (Celce-Murcia et al. 2010).
Speak along with the native voice, syllable by syllable. Students listen to a model recording and repeat simultaneously or with minimal delay, shadowing rhythm, stress and intonation. AI feedback shows how closely their version tracks the original.
Research basis: Shadowing is a well-studied technique that improves prosody, fluency and bottom-up listening (Kadota 2019).
She sells seashells — can you survive it? Students record themselves racing through English tongue twisters while AI scores clarity and accuracy. Playful overload of difficult sound sequences builds articulatory control and confidence.
Research basis: Repeated practice of demanding articulatory sequences supports automatization of speech production (Segalowitz 2010).
Same words, different melody, different meaning. Students listen to utterances and match them to the intended meaning carried by intonation — question, surprise, irony, doubt. Then they produce the melodies themselves with AI feedback.
Research basis: Discourse intonation carries grammatical and attitudinal meaning and is teachable through focused contrast (Chun 2002).
PHOtograph or phoTOgraphy? Stress decides. Students identify and produce the stressed syllable in English words, where stress can shift meaning and word class entirely. Fast rounds make stress patterns automatic rather than memorized.
Research basis: Lexical stress is a primary cue in English word recognition, and misplaced stress disrupts intelligibility (Field 2005; Cutler 2012).
Why "gonna" and "wanna" are real English. Students learn to hear and produce the reductions, linkings and elisions of natural fast speech: want to → wanna, did you → didja. Decoding real speech stops being a mystery.
Research basis: Connected speech phenomena are a major barrier in listening, and explicit training measurably improves decoding (Cauldwell 2013; Brown 1990).
Read the line the way the feeling demands. Students read sentences aloud expressing a given emotion — joy, anger, doubt — and AI evaluates whether the voice actually carries it. Pronunciation practice meets expressive speech.
Research basis: Vocal expression of emotion follows measurable acoustic patterns that can be perceived and trained (Scherer 2003).
Catch the mispronounced word in the recording. Students listen to recordings containing deliberate pronunciation errors and hunt them down. Noticing what is wrong in someone else's speech sharpens the monitor for one's own.
Research basis: Noticing errors is a precondition for acquisition, and error-focused feedback drives improvement (Schmidt 1990; Lyster & Ranta 1997).
Read the text — the AI listens and coaches. Students read short passages aloud while AI evaluates accuracy, pace and clarity word by word. Repeated reading of the same passage turns halting decoding into confident fluent speech.
Research basis: Repeated oral reading is one of the best-evidenced methods for building reading fluency (Samuels 1979).
Sing your way to natural rhythm. Students follow a highlighted text synchronized with audio, reading or singing along in real time. Music and rhythm carry stress patterns and connected speech into memory almost effortlessly.
Research basis: Musical rhythm and song support phonological memory and prosody acquisition (Patel 2008; Medina 1993).
The very first link: letter to sound. Beginners connect English letters with the sounds they make, one correspondence at a time. This is the entry point of the phonics track for the youngest and newest learners.
Research basis: Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is the foundation of reading acquisition (Ehri 2005; Adams 1990).
Which words start with the same sound? Young learners match pictures and words that share a beginning sound. The game builds the ear for sounds before letters even enter the picture.
Research basis: Phonemic awareness — hearing the sounds inside words — strongly predicts later reading success (Adams 1990).
The alphabet with rhythm in its bones. Students chant the alphabet and letter sounds to a rhythmic beat, recording themselves and getting playful feedback. Rhythm turns rote sequence into durable memory.
Research basis: Rhythmic chants and jazz-chant techniques aid retention of language patterns in young learners (Graham 1978; Patel 2008).
Match the spelling to the sound it hides. A matching game where students pair spelling patterns with the sounds they represent — including the tricky ones like "igh" and "ough". English spelling stops being random.
Research basis: Learning rime and analogy patterns supports decoding in opaque orthographies like English (Goswami & Bryant 1990).
Hear the word, touch the picture. The simplest possible listening game: a word sounds, the learner taps the matching picture. Zero reading required — comprehension comes first, production later.
Research basis: Comprehension-first, movement-based response follows Total Physical Response principles (Asher 1969).
Hear it, say it back, get it right. Students hear a word and immediately repeat it into the microphone; AI checks how close the echo is. Tight listen-repeat loops build the sound-motor link for new vocabulary.
Research basis: Immediate vocal repetition engages the phonological loop, the working-memory system behind word learning (Baddeley 1992).
Tap the beat of the word. Students listen to words and tap the rhythm, marking the stressed syllable physically. Feeling stress in the body makes an abstract feature concrete for beginners.
Research basis: Metrical stress patterns are foundational to English rhythm and can be trained through motor response (Hayes 1995).
See it, name it, out loud. A picture appears and the learner names it aloud; AI confirms the word and its pronunciation. Retrieval from memory plus articulation doubles the learning effect of every card.
Research basis: Active retrieval practice strengthens memory far more than passive review (Roediger & Butler 2011).
Something sounds wrong — repair it. Students hear a word pronounced with one wrong sound and must say the corrected version. Repairing errors trains the internal model of how English should sound.
Research basis: Error detection and repair exercises develop phonological monitoring, a key self-correction skill in speech (Levelt 1983).
From single words to whole sentences, aloud. Beginners read short simple sentences aloud with word-by-word AI feedback. The bridge between naming words and reading real text.
Research basis: Fluency develops when decoding becomes automatic, freeing attention for meaning (LaBerge & Samuels 1974).
Copy the melody, not just the words. Students hear short phrases with strong intonation contours and imitate the melody as closely as they can. Early prosody practice prevents flat "robot English" later.
Research basis: Intonation contours are systematic and learnable; early imitation builds accurate prosodic templates (Pierrehumbert 1980).
Play your part in the conversation. Students take one role in a short dialogue, listening to the partner line and speaking their own in response. Conversational timing and turn-taking become natural through rehearsal.
Research basis: Rehearsed dialogic interaction supports internalization of language through social exchange (Vygotsky 1978; Murphey 2001).
Cat — top — pen: link words by their sounds. Students build chains where each word starts with the final sound of the previous one. A playful workout for hearing where words begin and end.
Research basis: Sound-based word games strengthen phonological processing, which underpins both listening and reading (Radeau et al. 1989).
Build the sentence, then say it out loud. Students assemble a sentence from word tiles and then read their creation aloud. Producing the sentence twice — by hand and by voice — locks in both structure and sound.
Research basis: Reading aloud what you produce yourself exploits the production effect: self-generated, vocalized material is remembered best (MacLeod et al. 2010).
See how the sound is made — then make it. Visual guides show lip and tongue positions for English sounds; students imitate and record. Seeing articulation demystifies sounds that don't exist in the home language.
Research basis: Articulatory awareness — knowing how sounds are physically produced — supports perception and production of new phonemes (Liberman & Mattingly 1985).
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