<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 8:54 PM, K. K. Subramaniam <<a href="mailto:subbukk@gmail.com">subbukk@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im">On Monday 14 December 2009 09:00:23 pm Aleksey Lim wrote: > > Hello everybody, > > > > This afternoon, I had an interesting conversation with a Montessori > > teacher, about Speak. She asked me why Speak says "a" when "a" is pressed > > and not the sound of the letter "a". Montessori teachers teach the shape > > and sound of letters first, and then the name of the alphabet. I did not > > have an answer for her, but I wondered if it would be possible to have an > > option in Speak to do so. > > not sure it could be done in existed Speak(it just passes string to > speak engine). But it could separate activity or mode in Speak which > teaches alphabet. </div>Isn't Speak an overkill for such basic lessons? Montessori teachers would find Scratch or EToys useful for such exercises. They can prepare a list of words and record their associated 'a' sounds. Script word objects to respond with the appropriate sound when letter 'a' is dropped on them (or the 'a' key is pressed with the mouse hovering over a word) . This puts more control on the quality of pronunciation in the hands of teachers. Subbu </blockquote></div> The concern was more along the lines of "It will confuse our students because we teach them phonetically" as opposed to anything else. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University <a href="http://verma.sfsu.edu/">http://verma.sfsu.edu/</a> <a href="http://cbs.sfsu.edu/">http://cbs.sfsu.edu/</a> <a href="http://is.sfsu.edu/">http://is.sfsu.edu/</a>