These are the complete slide decks for an 11-day pronunciation course I teach to Level 1 (beginner) adult ESL students in my summer classes — 63 decks in all, plus a set of phone-friendly practice games. They run on Zoom. They're free for you to download and use, change however you like, and make your own. My teaching notes are tucked into the speaker notes of every deck — what to say, the questions to ask, the little tricks.
I built a version of this course last summer — by hand, generating images one at a time in ChatGPT, with a little help here and there. It took most of a summer. This year's version was rebuilt, start to finish, in about a day.
I'm not a linguist, and I have very little formal teacher training — just a lot of years in the room, noticing things. One thing I'd noticed: I have a growing number of Afghan students, many of them Farsi/Dari speakers, who are wonderful at repeating and understanding once a word is said and, in a sense, decoded for them — but who don't yet know the sounds of English letters and words very well. The Roman alphabet is new to them.
So this year I wanted to go beyond memorizing letters and their sounds, and actually help students with the code — the decoding that turns letters on a page into spoken words. I knew the symptom from years of watching it. I didn't know how to name it or build a method around it.
On Friday, June 12 — our optional teacher-prep day — I sat down with Claude (the Fable 5 model) and asked it to rethink my whole course from last summer with that concern in mind. We talked it through. It helped me see the pattern clearly, shape a pedagogy around it — front-loading the alphabet and letter-sounds, stretching decoding across the early days, pushing the harder schwa and reduction work to the end — and then it built the media to teach it. Not a plan for me to execute. The actual, ready-to-use decks.
At the very end, I asked it to make practice games the students could use at home on their phones. It started with 11 — one per day — and they were terrific. Then this morning I asked for three games per day instead of one. It did that in about ten minutes.
I spent all day yesterday on this. A long, long day. But the strange part is how little of the actual work was mine. Claude built the decks, ready to use. It built this website. It even pointed my domain name — murraycohen.com — at the site. To update anything, all I do now is drag a folder from my desktop into my free hosting service, and it's live.
The piece that still surprises me: Claude Code and Cowork work right on my own computer — reading, writing, arranging, and organizing my files where they actually live. I'm not copying and pasting things back and forth. It does the work in place.
If you're a teacher and you're not using Claude, Claude Code, and Cowork yet — you should be. I mean that plainly. It helped me find things in my own teaching I'd half-noticed for years, turn them into a method, and then build the materials to teach that method — fast, and at a quality I couldn't have produced alone.
Take these decks. Use them. Change them. And if they help even one student crack the code, that's exactly what they're for.