Pronunciation Matters — Upcoming Platform
Pronunciation Matters extends the MAR.ELE pilot into a unified, modern platform for learner pronunciation corpora across English, French, Spanish, and German as a foreign/second language — integrating audio, aligned transcriptions, and rich metadata for research, teaching, and school transfer.
What it is
Pronunciation Matters is a funded teaching-and-research initiative at Philipps-Universität Marburg. It builds on the proven MAR.ELE workflows (data collection → AI-supported transcription with timestamps → publication via WebApp) and scales them into a multilingual ecosystem with consistent pipelines and a central landing page that bundles multiple language modules.
The goal is a stable, well-documented platform where authentic learner pronunciation becomes systematically explorable and directly usable in university teaching and school contexts, including direct comparison of learner speech and model speakers.
What will be new compared to MAR.ELE
- Multiple language corpora in one platform: English, French, Spanish, and German (DaF/DaZ).
- Standardized pipelines so future language modules can be added efficiently and reproducibly.
- Modern MD3-style web design (in the spirit of the CO.RA.PAN web app) for a clean, accessible UX.
- Teaching integration: supports linguistic and didactic seminar formats with authentic research data and audio.
- Transfer: materials designed to be used beyond the university, including school pronunciation teaching.
Project collaboration
Pronunciation Matters is developed as a collaborative project at Marburg University. It brings together expertise from multiple language departments, with each partner contributing responsibility for a specific learner-language corpus:
Pronunciation Matters is coordinated by Felix Tacke (project lead), who is responsible for the Spanish pronunciation corpus and the project’s digital infrastructure.
The project is developed in close collaboration with Rolf Kreyer (English), Janina Reinhardt (French), and Kathrin Siebold (German as a Foreign / Second Language), who are responsible for the respective learner pronunciation corpora. All partners jointly contribute to the conceptual design and ongoing development of the linguistic data and materials, establishing Pronunciation Matters as a genuinely cross-linguistic research and teaching project.
Award & funding
Pronunciation Matters was recognized in the Lehre@Philipp award program at Marburg University, which supports innovative and sustainable teaching concepts. The project received targeted funding to support its development, including student research assistants, the expansion of transcription and time-alignment workflows, and the technical realization and hosting of the platform.
For a brief introduction to the teaching project, see the video (only in German):
Status
Pronunciation Matters is currently in preparation. The platform is scheduled to launch in summer/autumn as a multilingual landing page linking to the individual language modules.