Phonetercise

Phonetic Word Processor - by Larry Kahn

Review by Jonathan Myers

I have just spent a pleasurable time playing around with Phonetercise, which its creator, Larry Kahn, hopes will be ‘a simple phonetic word processor that (he) hopes ESL teachers will find useful’. In this he has succeeded. The most powerful tool for me was the ‘Quick Keyboard’: a compact keypad that you can have constantly accessible on your desktop and which will allow you to drag and drop phonetic script into a word processor such as Word or WordPerfect. Previously, the quickest option I had had was to utilize the Lucida Sans Unicode font installed with newer versions of Word by either defining the shortcut Function keys to the most common symbols or using the Symbol command within Word. This meant either memorizing the shortcuts or having a ‘cheat-sheet’ to remind me. Phonetercise makes this so much easier. The only disadvantage is, as Larry himself admits, that he has not included all the symbols that a teacher might need. For example, there is no way to indicate stress. As a teacher working in the United States, it would obviously be helpful too to have a North American English version sometime soon.

A second feature of Phonetercise is ‘Quick List’ which enables you to use a database of words with their phonetic spellings to create simple exercises for use in the classroom. By selecting a dictionary level and then a phoneme, you are presented with a list of words containing the phoneme from the database. You can then select the words you wish to use and hit Print. Your printer will then give you a simple phonetic spelling exercise based on the words you have selected.

The last feature is the Word Processor which accesses both a phonetic keyboard and the database. This is most useful to add to the database of words and therefore create your own custom exercises. Again, by Larry’s own admission, this is not as user friendly as it could be. Adding a new word to the database was not quite as simple as the otherwise comprehensive and clear Help entries said it should be, and I seemed to get trapped in a loop that would not accept that I had completed the addition of a new entry without selecting ‘undo’, which seemed somewhat counter-intuitive! It also took a while to get used to the fact that text had to be entered from the keyboard because only phonetic script could be dragged and dropped from the Workspace.

However, especially if the keypad were extended further, the program would be worth it for that alone.