Hi Dennis,
I think the advantage of hearing words as spoken by anonymous subscribers is that they
may be more real than the standardised choices of 'experts'. For it to work you would
need various contributions for each word. The words would then be 'tagged' with
information such as where the speaker is from.
One element of all Web 2.0 applications is that they become powerful once they've got a
certain mass of users. As it stands I can't see Forvo achieving this because the process of
contributing isn't very interesting - you need some form of social interaction.
I agree completely that human to human is the most effective form of developing
pronunciation, but that's what Web 2.0 is about. It is not at all about technology that will
analyse and grade or provide advice (that's possibly Web 3.0!)
Web 2.0 refers to internet sites that serve as a platform for human communication. What's
interesting is that it's leading to ways of communicating that didn't exist before. There's
some interesting stuff going on in YouTube. Search for "The Chaos of English
Pronunciation" - there a poem about pron read by a native speaker, and L2 users are
responding to by giving their attempt at it, then people are posting comments.
I think there's a lot of potential in this.

Alex.

--- In iatefl_pronsig@..., "dnewson2001" <djn@...> wrote:
>
> Alex,
>
> I agree Forvo looks limited in usefulness. How helpful is it to have
> the prn of "Life" - 'made by an anonymous subscriber to Forvo.'
>
> Forgetting the technology for a moment, what help do learners need
> with pronunciation? One can't generalise but it is likely to consist
> of things like distinction between (especially) verb phonems,
> intonation and stress, perhaps.
>
> What could an online program do? Provide examples of phrases
> acceptably spoken to be repeated and recorded. All I've suggested, of
> course, is the old language laboratory approach. I'd say a live
> teacher is the most use for working on pronunciation. And even web 2.0
> is not up to useful analysis of recorded spoken language, is it?
>
> Dennis
>