Vocabulary Beats

The Vocabulary Beats are a key feature of Studio, the new young-adult course from Helbling Languages. Each track takes individual words and builds them into phrases, leaving space for students to repeat. Spoken over a music backing track, they use a ‘drill’ approach of repetition to help students practise articulation and intonation. The musical support shows how stress-timed speaking works, how we use weak forms and stress certain words.

The Vocabulary Beats are included in the Studio Workbook. At the end of every second unit, a Review Unit includes a vocabulary wordlist (click on the image to enlarge). Students first listen to the audio track, finding and underlining the words in the Wordlist. They then listen again, repeating the words in time to the music track. Students can listen and repeat the words and phrases while they study, exercise, or relax. They allow students to build confidence without the pressure of having to speak perfectly.

This is the corresponding Vocabulary Beats audio track for the sample wordlist. I wrote and recorded the music tracks. The words and phrases are spoken by Ayesha Mendham, and were recorded at Cadenza.

For the American edition of Studio, the words and phrases are spoken by Dan Bittner. The American lyrics were edited by Anna Whitcher and vocals produced by Steven Tolle at CityVox in New York.

This video is a visual representation of one of the tracks from Studio Pre-Intermediate. Over the 6 levels of Studio, there are 36 Vocabulary Beats tracks that use 12 different music backing tracks.