ENGLISH BARRIER BREAKER
IELTS Exam Preparation
Improve Pronunciation With James!
Hello, I'm James!
I have taught English online for over 4 years and one of my specialties is pronunciation. I teach my students the essential, foundational pronunciation skills needed to sound like a native.
Here you'll find a surplus of resources and activities that I made to help you master your standard US/American pronunciation. Mastering pronunciation requires you to learn more than just pronouncing some words correctly...
There are patterns, there are rules, there are tools and terminologies.
Two reasons you should learn this way:
1. You will learn to pronounce ALL words correctly, not just some.
2. You will learn the patterns of native speakers and how to use them
So take a look around, and please reach out to me if you would like any explaining, its my passion!
Your Pronunciation Study Guide!
The Basics of Pronunciation:
Pronunciation is the proper production of sounds that allows you to be clearly understood. This is different from accent which is only a slight difference in the sounds made, caused by an influence from your native language. You can have perfect pronunciation and an accent at the same time, as long as the accent does interfere with your ability to be understood (your intelligibility).
The international phonetic alphabet, or IPA, is an system of symbols that provides one specific symbol (or letter) for each sound.
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The IPA is used for all languages.
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The IPA tells you how you should pronounce any word, using this alphabet you can pronounce any word in any language, even if you have never seen it before.
what are phonemes and graphemes?
Phoneme is a word we use in pronunciation that refers to one unit of sound, these are the smallest units of sound. you can imagine it by thinking of what sound one single letter makes.
Graphemes are the written versions of phonemes. They are symbols from the IPA that represent one smallest unit of sound.
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For more information, click the link above. If you choose to study pronunciation, you will learn a lot about graphemes and phonemes.
What is voice?
Voice refers to the use of vibrations in the throat. sounds in English are divided into sounds that require this vibration (voiced sounds) and sounds that require you to not use this vibration (unvoiced sounds).
What are the articulators?
Individual sounds (phonemes)
Consonants & Vowels
The articulators are the parts of the mouth that are used in pronunciation. Knowing the specific parts of the mouth will allow you to understand instructions of how sounds are produced.
Consonants and vowels are the two most basic ways to divide sounds. All sounds are divided as being either consonants or vowels.
To learn exactly what they are, how they are different, and how we pronounce them.
Tricky Sounds
Some sounds in English are especially tricky. So I have made a page dedicated to these sounds.
For example, these sounds are especially difficult when they are in similar sounding words:
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L & R (like in the words "fly" and "fry")
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SH & CH (like in the words "ship" and "chip")
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T & D (like in the words "tie" and "die")
Minimal pairs
Minimal pairs are words that are pronounced the same, but have one difference in sound, these are really great for practicing difficult sounds.
For example:
1. Fry & fly
2. Toe & dough
3. Sheep & ship
Patterns and rules
Word stress
Sentence Stress
Word stress refers to the emphasis that we put on one syllable in word. To put emphasis on a syllable means to say is it louder and not as fast as the rest of the words.
Sentence stress is similar to word stress. Whereas word stress emphasizes/stresses one syllable in a word, sentnece stress emphasizes/stresses one word in a sentence.
Sentence stress has a very large impact on the meaning of what we say, consider the example below:
ADD CANVA PHOTO
Connected speech
Connected speech refers to the many ways that we join words together in spoken language. These ways include linking, chunking, intrusion, assimilation, and elision.
Linking
Linking is a specific type of connected speech that refers to how we join words together and make them sound like a single word
CANVA PHOTO
turn off - tur-noff
this orange - thi-sorange
Elision
Elision means to remove sounds from a word. There are many patterns that you can find by clicking the link above, but one common example is the when one word ends with the same sound that the next word begins with.
For example:
Assimilation
Assimilation refers to sounds being changed based on the influence of neighboring sounds.
for example: ....
Intrusion
Chunking
intrusion occurs when we add an additional sound to a word or in between words to make the pronunciaiton easier or smoother.
for example:
chunking refers the when we group common expression or pairs or groups of words due to their high frequency. This usually results in a very lazy sounding pronunciaiton wehre we all the sounds are not pronounced clearly.