How to Improve Your English Pronunciation

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english_pronunciation

One of the questions I get most often as an English teacher is, “How can I sound like a native English speaker?” My response to this is - don’t try to sound exactly like a native. Clarity of speech is more important than sounding like you were born and raised in an English speaking country. Your accent is one of the unique things about you and you should be proud of it because it shows how hard you worked to learn English as a second language. However, you can and should focus on making your pronunciation clear and easily understood.

Here are three steps you should follow to improve your English pronunciation:

  1. Go back to the building blocks of language and master all of the basic sounds of English. You can consult a phonemic chart for a list of all of the sounds in the English language. Watching videos is a good way to see what the mouth looks like when the sounds are pronounced: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/features/pronunciation

    Depending upon what your first language is, you may or may not have sounds that match the ones in English. You should research which sounds in English are most different from those in your first language, and spend extra time practicing those sounds.

  2. After you master the sounds of English, the next step is to work on word syllable emphasis. Depending on the word, different parts will sound stronger (have more emphasis). For example, “compete” is pronounced as “com-PETE” - with the “PETE” syllable sounding stronger than the “com” syllable.

  3. Finally, after you feel confident with English sounds and word syllable emphasis, you should focus on learning which words to emphasize in a sentence. For example, “Did YOU go home this morning?” has a slightly different meaning than “Did you go HOME this morning?” In the first sentence, the focus is on figuring out who did the action, but in the second sentence, the focus is on figuring out where the person went.

    Additionally, sentences in English tend to follow a rhythm based on the importance of the words in the sentence. For example, in the sentence, “I ate an apple on Monday”, the emphasis is on the verb “ate” and on the nouns, “apple” and “Monday”.