Learning to pronounce the English language can be an arduous task.

For years, thousands of people around the world have relied on English Accent Coach (EAC) to support their developing pronunciation skills.

And recently, the website — a long-running project of Brock University Professor Ron Thomson — underwent major improvements to increase access and further its reach beyond its nearly 29,000 registered users worldwide.

The relaunch includes upgrades based on both research findings and feedback from end users, including people studying pronunciation and English-language teachers.

English Accent Coach Asteroids is now available for download in the App store.

“Learning to perceive sounds in a second language is a precursor to learning to accurately pronounce those sounds,” says Thomson, a leading expert in the field of pronunciation research who is part of Brock’s Department of Applied Linguistics. “EAC is an effective way of rapidly improving sound perception for English vowels and consonants while also helping learners associate English sounds with phonetic symbols. Learners of English can use that knowledge to pronounce phonetically spelled words found in most English dictionaries.”

The updated user interface is now responsive on both mobile and desktop devices. Other new features include the ability to record pronunciation to compare with audio samples and improvements to the gamification aspects that have helped the tool succeed.

Echo, the game tool, is not unlike the children’s game Simon and uses colours, symbols or keywords to quiz users about how sounds are pronounced.

Thomson also recently launched an iOS app, English Accent Coach Asteroids, to complement EAC. His adaptation of a 1980s-style arcade game can support learners trying to improve their ability to identify English vowel sounds from different voices at increasing levels of difficulty.

Recent Psychology graduate Dawn Kakiroko (BA ’24) worked as a research assistant testing the efficiency, quality and user-friendliness of the EAC updates and creating a survey for ESL teachers who use the tool.

“I think it is important for teachers and learners to know that EAC is a tool to help improve difficulties learners have producing English sounds; it is not intended to change one’s accent but only to improve your ability to communicate with people across a wide variety of contexts,” she says. “Using a tool such as EAC to support a learner’s ability to produce English sounds may ease their ability to communicate in different contexts.”

Students of pronunciation aren’t the only people benefitting from the relaunch, which also offers researcher mode, a special access for researchers who can set variables for research participants to test their own research questions. Thomson is currently working with a PhD student in Japan on such a project.

Kakiroko says that she has noticed benefits to using EAC, even as an already proficient English speaker.

“I have gained better understanding of the English phonetic symbols that will be beneficial when looking at new terms that I don’t know how to pronounce,” she says.

It is a long journey for a website that began as a standalone app when Thomson was himself a PhD student.

“I’m quite proud of the fact that it has been online and getting better, now with quite a major improvement, for over 12 years,” he says. “It’s a perfect example of knowledge mobilization, where I’m working with actual practitioners on a tool that other people find useful and accessible.”