In a bid to keep a low level of revision going the Ted Corpus Search Engine (TCSE) could be useful. Taking the example of neither (borrowed from a Guy Aston workshop on spoken corpora at Lancaster TaLC 11 this summer) I intend to ask them how they think it is spelt phonetically.
Then I will ask them to search for the word in the TCSE and to look at entry 555 – Michelle Obama and then entry 768 David Cameron and get them to see if they can transcribe the phonetic differences (/ni:ðər/ and /naiðə/ respectively).
Update 1:
I used the above in my classes recently and it went very well, it was integrated with another worksheet they were already doing on pronunication and phonetics. I introduced it with Google images of Michelle Obama and David Cameron.
The following are some more words I may try in future classes:
Garage
880 Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff UK
1931 Christopher Ryan: Are we designed to be sexual omnivores? US
1911 Yves Morieux: As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify Fr
Glacier
561 Yann Arthus-Bertrand: A wide-angle view of fragile Earth Fr
1768 Didier Sornette: How we can predict the next financial crisis Fr
535 Al Gore: What comes after An Inconvenient Truth? US
Zebra
1699 Richard Turere: My invention that made peace with lions Kenyan
735 Kiran Sethi: Kids, take charge Ind
1701 Colin Camerer: Neuroscience, game theory, monkeys US
1103 Paul Root Wolpe: It’s time to question bio-engineering US
Nuclear
2069 Andrew Connolly: What’s the next window into our universe? UK
2067 Martin Rees:Can we prevent the end of the world? UK
2035 Chris Domas: The 1s and 0s behind cyber warfare US
1979 Michel Laberge: How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion Fr
Update 2:
The TCSE puts in a delay of 10 seconds when playing the youtube video, to get youtube to play your search term immediately you need to add in 10s, have a read here by the developer on how to do this.
Update 3:
TCSE plays your search term immediately now with an option to play 10 seconds earlier.
EFL Notes 
Hi Mura, great to learn about this TED corpus search engine — very cool that it links to the exact spot in the video as well. Could be a fun way to explore non-native and L2 English accents as well, since TED is shaping up to be a real international corpus. With the transcripts also nicely chunked for the subtitles, I can imagine interesting questions around chunking and prosody as well. Good stuff!
Best,
Ray
hi Ray
yes i imagine ELF researchers such as yourself would be very interested in TED talks
apparently the TCSE searches you tube so if a search fails a wrong video will be played which happens occasionally
Guy Aston has developed an audio only corpus of TED talks that works with WordSmith, and it works very well
ta
mura
This is great! I had pictured this kind of multimodal web corpus months ago and glad someone had the skill to make it
It is a nice interface for sure, have u read about Guy Aston’s audio TED corpus? https://eflnotes.wordpress.com/guy-aston-talks-speech-corpora/ you can contact him to get a copy though it only works with WordSmith at the mo.
ta
mura