Phonostack: Board Game for Pronunciation and Vocabulary Building

The adoption of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in Malaysia aims to internationalise communicative benchmarking, but implementation may still face challenges. In Malaysian secondary ESL contexts, one area of concern that educators encounter is learners’ issues in pronunciation, which is driven by a lack of explicit prosody training and imported materials that are contextually foreign. Thus, this paper presents Phonostack, a conceptual innovation introducing an educational board game designed to provide authentic pronunciation practice and vocabulary mastery aligned with CEFR descriptors. As a tactile, strategy-based tabletop game featuring dice, tokens, and targeted word lists, Phonostack serves as an interactive instructional framework to enhance phonological accuracy, articulation, and suprasegmentals (stress, rhythm, and intonation). By prioritizing physical interaction over digital automation, the game minimizes learner isolation and lowers affective barriers. This manuscript details the instructional mechanics, preliminary trial feedback from Malaysian ESL learners, enhanced self-correction technologies (such as QR-linked authentic audio), and a detailed quasi-experimental design for future empirical validation.

English as a second language, CEFR, pronunciation, vocabulary, board game.

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