After retiring in Mar. 2009 I forgot all about the strategy that I had come up with in 2003 to make English pronunciation “intuitive” for my students. I started using Portuguese sounds to try and correct some rooted pronunciation mistakes that I noticed in my 7th graders in their third year of English. And it worked extremely well. Naturally, the strategy was then extended to difficult new words.
In March 2012 I was contacted by Judy Thompson in Linked In. She was a total stranger to me so I "googled" her name and came up with interesting results, among them, her English Phonetic Alphabet (EPA). She just used letters in the English alphabet to create simple and intuitive sounds to help her ESL immigrant adult students pronounce English. It also worked wonders, as she later told me.
It was with the encouragement of this group made up of colleagues-turned-friends that Pronunciation Made Easy (for short) came to be. Judy was perhaps the most enthusiastic of all, because she related 100% to my work. She said she'd never seen anything like my strategy - simple and intuitive - and thought it could be applied to many other languages. Anyway, each and everyone encouraged me. And I accepted the challenge. It would be self-published online. Being the enthusiast I was (and still am!) for technology in education, I couldn't do it any other way. In several aspects I was moving into uncharted territory, an added challenge. :-)
If you’d like to download a sample of Pronunciation Made Easy, or buy it, click here.