Our last two posts have focused on diversity and inclusion in the classroom. Today I’d like to offer some resources for another important way to create a positive classroom climate: knowing your students’ names and pronouncing them correctly. A previous post Learning Your Students’ Names [September 6, 2013] will give you some tips for the first part. But making sure you pronounce names correctly can be challenging. Rather than stumbling through the attendance list on the first day of class, you can prepare ahead and know that you will be in the ballpark as you call names.

The first resource comes from the K-12 world, but is useful for us in higher education as well. Getting It Right: Reference Guides for Registering Students with Non-English Names (2nd Edition), gives a general overview of the naming conventions in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese languages.  Each section provides guidance such as the number of given names or family names and the order of these names.

The My Identity/My Name website’s Take Action section has a list of online resources with links to web tools and applications that will help you to correctly pronounce names (as well as geographical places, phrases, and words). Here is a partial version of their list with the resources that seemed most relevant:

Forvo is a great web tool to learn how to pronounce words from a wide array of categories including common words, phrases and people’s names.

Guiding Tech: 4 Useful websites to help you pronounce names correctly features four possible tools a teacher, parent or student may use to help learn the correct pronunciation of a name they wish to use. Within the article are the links to all 4 sites.

 How to Pronounce is a great web application to get the audio and text pronunciation, meaning and other information related to wiki pages, synonyms and antonyms for the searched word.

Pronounce by VOA News is one of the great free web tools for learning more about pronunciation of places and names. Founded in 2000, this Pronounce tool has a plethora of words and names to find from. 

Regardless of your preparation before you take attendance in your first class, you should always confirm with the student that you’ve pronounced their name correctly and determine what name they would like to be called in your class.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Pixabay.com