Why I Created Juna

Ann Bartholomew

Why am I passionate about pronunciation? I believe accents are part of what’s beautiful in the world.  But communication between people is the most important part of language. When an accent interferes with being understood, all people in the conversation lose out.

I went back to school in 2009 to learn how to teach English. After I received my TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) certificate, I wasn’t sure what sort of teaching I wanted to do. To get experience, I volunteered as a tutor and conversation group facilitator through a local library. 

One day, a woman called to ask if we helped with pronunciation. She was frustrated because she was a professional who had grown up speaking English, but her accent was getting in the way of being understood at work. This was a problem she urgently wanted to solve.  Unfortunately, this was not part of the program and like most other English teachers, I’d been given very little information on how to teach pronunciation. Though I couldn’t help, her request sparked my curiosity.

In my early research, I learned that the commonly held view that adults can’t change their accent is not true. While learning native-sounding pronunciation is difficult, it is possible to achieve good results by retraining one’s mouth muscles with awareness and practice. As I learned more, I found that paying close attention to my own mouth muscles and to language sounds was fascinating. Perhaps it was because I had grown up playing the flute and this kind of attention to sound seemed quite familiar. I continued to learn about pronunciation by reading academic materials, taking accent courses, going to conferences, workshops, and watching YouTube videos. 

As I worked one-on-one with students, I thought animation would be an effective way to show what was going on inside the mouth in a clear and easily accessible way. This was the start of the Juna app. Working with my students, we learned together what methods helped them feel more in control of their speech and their experiences became an important part of the app’s evolution. 

You can see some of the sources I used in the resources section of this website.