I'll be presenting on "Making a Difference... in Pronunciation" on April 30 at the 29th APPI Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
The presentation will be about my e-dictionary.

Here's a part of the abstract:
"Pronunciation Made Easy, an e-dictionary, is always handy whether at the click of the mouse or touch of the screen. It's intuitive and learner-friendly. It's targeted at beginners. But also at intermediate learners. And it's full of useful words."


I will upload the presentation to Slideshare soon after and will share the link here.

One of the most useful and user-considerate hints I read was that e-books need to be read across different platforms - pdf and epub formats are the most widely read -, and need to be reflowable, meaning the text size and formatting adapt to the screen size. Reflowability was something that was always in the back of my mind, because I found it so user-friendly, especially when reading in the iPhone. Things have been changing fast lately and many platforms now provide previews across devices such as PCs and smartphones. And many websites that I visit regularly have become reflowable. It’s perfectly obvious when reading in the iPhone. 

This concept of reflowability led me to search through many pdf e-books to see if any included the feature. Unfortunately not, not even when reading in the Acrobat Reader app. The font is usually quite small, so what I do is turn the phone horizontally and pinch the screen to adjust the text size. Not practical. Unfortunately, the same happens in my dictionary.

In the next few weeks I'll be posting about how the e-dictionary idea came about and the creation process developed. And what I explored and learned about e-publishing and self-publishing over a year and a half. It's a way of reflecting on different things, writing them down before I forget them and… maybe helping others embark on a similar (ad)venture.

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.

Here's something very interesting that I came across this morning. I know some of these words. What I like most about them is the weird mix of words in each, their crazy sounds and the way you spell some of them. Above all, their pronunciation.
Let me try to help Portuguese-speaking learners pronounce them in a very easy way. The /a/ sound is like the "a" in agora.

kerfuffle /karfafel/
hullaballoo /halabalú/
cacophony /kakófani/
ragamuffin /ráegamafin/
whippersnapper /uíparsnáepar/
gobbledygook /góbeldigúk/
gibberish /djibarich/
poppycock /pópikók/
discombobulate (disskanbóbiuleit/
flummox /flamakz/
curmudgeon /karmadjan/
lackadaisical /láekadeizikel/
woebegone /uoubigón/
lollygag /lóligáeg/
frankenfood /fráenkanfúd/

Puzzled by a few of my sounds?! Why not take a look at my e-dictionary next door? Sorry, I meant in the next tab above.  ;-)

Interested in making a difference? I am. In fact, I did. In hundreds of Portuguese EFL students for several years. How?

I came up with a strategy to make the pronunciation of English intuitive and learner-friendly. What's so different and unique about it?

It bridges the L1 and L2. I use Portuguese sounds to show the pronunciation of English words.

It came up to me in class one day, twelve years ago, and it had immediate results. Students used to mispronounce everyday English words on a regular basis. And they were in their third year of English! :-(

I started with common words such as 'I', 'apple', 'tea', 'teacher', 'student'. I wrote the equivalent Portuguese sounds between slashes: /ai/, /aépel/, /tí/, /títchar/ and /stiudant/. Bingo! It worked! They pronounced them correctly every time I pointed randomly to one of the words on the board.

It was magic! How could such a simple solution suddenly correct built-in mistakes?

I created a webpage at once that was updated regularly. And I used the strategy till the end of the school year. The students' pronunciation improved significantly.

This simple, homemade recipe generated even greater enthusiasm and engagement the following school year with my beginner EFLers in the5th grade. It caught on immediately and everyone wanted their recipe accepted for more problematic words, because it would go on the Internet. :-)

Once again I created a webpage and had a notetaker in every class to jot down the words and their pronunciation. I'd take the sheet of paper home every day and update the webpage. It was low tech and high tech working together for the benefit of the students. This webpage was their reference for pronunciation.

Why does this mean so much to me? Because correct pronunciation is a very significant part of making yourself understood and getting your message across.

Years later, with the encouragement of the Radical English teachers group, I started working on an e-dictionary that was self-published at the beginning of September 2014.

I hope it will become known to all Portuguese-speaking teachers and learners of English. We're many millions worldwide.

And I also hope that it may inspire English teachers of other native languages to try out something similar.

You're welcome to download the sample or get the full version Pronunciation Made Easy for Portuguese-speaking learners of English with 3.500 words. Just click the "e-Dictionary" tab above.

And feel free to spread the word whether through mouth or mouse! Your students will be grateful!

Enjoy pronouncing!!!  :-)

These are some of the comments that colleagues have made about my e-dictionary.  :-)

After months of hard, but very enjoyable work, Pronunciation Made Easy is out and just a click away.
It was published earlier today, Sep. 6, on the 53rd anniversary of a four-year move to the States, a life-changing experience for me.
To get a free sample or buy the dictionary, click the e-Dictionary tab (above).
I hope it will be a very useful tool for Portuguese-speaking students to learn to pronounce many common English words in an easy and fun way.
And I hope that other languages will also try to bridge the L1 and L2.
Thank you to my Radical English colleagues and friends for encouraging me to carry out this project! :-)