"The Chaos" in the Classroom

"Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe."

This is an opening excerpt from "The Chaos" a poem composed by Gerard Nolst Trenité in the early 1920s. This is a tongue twister even for native speakers and it highlights the oddities of the English spoken language. There are absolutely potential mnemonic devices to be built off of this piece. I was thinking of ways to incorporate technology with this piece and I think building an interactive site that features linked auditory pronunciations would be a good tool for ELLs to practice with. Even with digital literacies it is important to stress the phonemic/phonetic value of our language as a key to student use and understanding. Here is a site that has recorded the poem and offered timestamps on the challenging words to help readers follow along, but I prefer to use pop-up links or something more embedded in the text.