"The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds".
Unfortunately, the text that's used across the archive is not very inspiring but the fact that all the recordings use it means that it's easy to compare accents and variations in pronunciation.
I've just used 2 recordings with my Post FCE group: a native speaker and a Spanish speaker.
I printed out the text and asked students to mark where they thought there would be sentence stress and where intonation would rise and fall.(We'd been working on this before, so they knew what I was talking about.)
They then listened to the native speaker and compared their notations with what they heard.
They then listened to the Spanish speaker and marked where he put sentence stress and how he used intonation - and drew their conclusions.
Finally, they practised themselves saying the text.
The activity turned out to be quite productive. The the fact that I could use an anonymous speaker as a model of what to avoid was a boon and got over the embarrassment that often occurs when you try to focus on the typical pronunciation problems that students have.
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