Expert English Pronunciation, Accent Reduction & Fluency
There are English words that can be nouns or verbs, depending on their stress. As nouns, they have 1st syllable stress; as verbs they are stressed on the 2nd syllable. Remember, stressed syllables have stronger, clearer vowels, and unstressed syllables have reduced vowels. The Read More …
For Arabic speakers, the pronunciation of these 3 words can be confounding. It is a place where the Arabic vowel system and the English vowel system do not match up. I use a multi-step approach to help sort out their sounds. Read More …
What are “minimal pairs”? Two words that have only one sound different between them, but it’s a sound that changes the meaning. Here are some examples of important “minimal pairs” to conquer, for different language speakers who are working on their English pronunciation. Read More …
Knowles’ theory, stated simply. I hope I’ve done him justice. If you’re teaching pronunciation to adults, make sure to incorporate as many of these as possible in your course design. Maximum learning comes from having all 6 in place. Malcolm Read More …
Woohoo! Hooray! Yay! In a couple of weeks, I’ll be publishing an e-book on Kindle and Amazon: English For Arabic Speakers,Teaching Pronunciation: What You Should Know & Do I hope you’ll find it helpful and informative. I’ve hired a a couple of Read More …
Effective pronunciation teaching always has these components 1. Raises awareness by helping students notice the difference when they hear it, and recognize when they produce it. For vowels and consonants, use tools like manythings.org/pp for listening recognition, and feedback loops Read More …
I use Audacity just about every week, to record myself and to record my students. Audacity is available for free, it is open software designed by volunteers and given to the world. It shows sound as spectrograms; I use the Read More …
First, go to the Sounds of Speech website: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english Find the front vowels, and study the /ae/ sound, noting what the jaw movement and back-of-tongue movement. This sound, /ae/, always occurs in stressed syllables. Then open http://m-w.com Type the word Read More …
You’ll just have to memorize them…. -ER spelling is pronounced -AIR as in [chair] inherit, inheritance, inherent, whereby, thereby, whereas, error, -ER spelling is pronounced -EAR as in [fear] coherent, coherence, criteria -AR spelling is pronounced -ER as in Read More …
Learn the pronunciation of the vowel in the stressed syllable, as well as how the ‘a’ in pronounced. I recommend using m-w.com to hear American pronunciation. The following words have at least one ‘a’ that sounds like the vowel in the Read More …