Forvo

2008

Lecturers
Students

Accounting
Business & Communication
Law
Medicine & Nursing
Teacher Education
Tourism

Autonomous learning
Classroom Context

Italian

Any language

A1
A2
B1
B2
C1
C2

Audio
Guiding resources (online course/book)
Reference resources (online Dictionaries/ grammar guides/phrasebooks)

Vocabulary
Pragmatics
Prosody

Listening
Speaking
Reading

Forvo is the largest pronunciation guide in the world, the place where to find millions of words and phrases pronounced in their original languages.
In 2008, Forvo was founded with the mission of improving spoken communication across cultures by creating a platform where users could share pronunciations of words in their native language and listen to words pronounced by other native speakers. Today, Forvo is the largest online reference for pronunciations with a database of nearly 6 million words pronounced in over 430 languages – all created and maintained by native speakers.
Forvo continues to work toward its mission as a go-to reference for authentic word pronunciations through over 110 million site visits annually and over 800,000 registered users. In 2013, Forvo was included in Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of the Year.”
Forvo provides the learner with useful words and phrases in the languages available (Italian). It's an advanced tool which will help the learner learn words and their pronunciations efficiently. The learner can use the dictionary in order to improve her/his vocabulary or s/he can choose a language course. The learner will be able to hear how the word is pronounced, as well as the meaning of the word and how it can be used in a phrase. The pronunciation database is alimented by Italian native speakers and the learner will also be able to distinguish between different regional variants.
10 minutes a day are enough to help the learner learn and improve the target language. The objective of the system is to learn 20 words a day. The learner will be led by the Forvo's algorithm which will select the words for him/her to learn each day based on the learner's learning patterns.
The learner needs to be registered on Forvo to start a course.

Case studies with 2 Spanish-speaker students of A2.2 level.
They found it user-friendly and useful for learning how to pronunce words, but they both complain about the scarce number of items of the database. The possibility to ask the correct pronunciation to a mother-language has been valued as a plus, but in case one is looking for the meaning of a word, Forvo is not very useful, because one must go back to a proper dictionary, moreover there is not an evaluation test, therefore it is difficult to understand whether the pronunciation learnd is correct. For all these reasons they did not find it motivating, nor innovative. They had no difficulty in using it.

The resource can be productively exploited both in the class-room and in the self-study situations. In the class-room, the teacher can organize group exercises, games or role-plays, in which: 1- the students must find and orally reproduce list of words in context (sentences) in order to reconstruct specific language interactions; 2- the students can create a database of words of interest in the target special language to exercise their pronunciation, they can also populate the database with new words that require pronunciation and ask for it within the Forvo site.
This last activity can be also used in the self-study context.