Dictionaraoke

Daniel T. Parker: It's possible that I've entirely lost my mind, but I just happened to land on this website tonight -- Dictionaraoke -- and I'm becoming more and more convinced that I can actually use it in listening comprehension lessons, by making tapes of the songs and taking them into class. But I'm not sure if I can quit laughing long enough to actually teach!

Dick Tibbetts: Great. Yes, I can use this to teach connected speech, stress, intonation and weak forms. Some of my students actually sound rather like this, or would if they could rapidly change gender and throw their voice at the same time. This site makes fun of 'disconnected speech' without there being any criticism of the students. First they do it like the mp3 in 2 groups, male and female, perhaps with lyrics up on the OHP, coloured for gender. Then, after we've laughed ourselves silly, we talk about why it's funny and set about identifying weak forms, stressed syllables and practice linking words. Then we sing it as it should be sung.

From Wikipedia:
The Dictionaraoke Project was conceived of in 2001 by the Snuggles Collective, a diverse group of experimental musicians communicating through the Internet. Inspired by the recent addition of spoken word audio clips to the Merriam-Webster and Microsoft Encarta online dictionaries demonstrating the correct pronunciation of each word, these artists used the samples to create artificial vocals that "sang" karaoke.

Listen to the dictionaries singing James Brown's "I Feel Good": I FEEL GOOD!