The Center for Confident American English Communication

It’s been many months since I’ve written a post on the importance of syllable stress. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about this….in my opinion using syllable stress and sentence level intonation correctly is probably the most effective way to improve your comprehensibility. That said, here’s a link to some syllable stress rules for two syllable nouns

Read more →

Many of the people who come to me for American English pronunciation lessons have a goal. That goal is to communicate more clearly and effectively in the workplace. One book that I just began to use with my clients is called Communicating in Business English. I like this book for the following reasons: 1. The

Read more →

This article published in the American Enterprise Institute Magazine explains a three of the reasons that English is so difficult to pronounce. 1. English spelling and pronunciation are not well coordinated. There are more sounds than letters…and one letter can have a variety of sounds. 2. English does not use accent marks or other symbols to denote

Read more →

ESL pod has a wide variety of medical English audio lessons. You can listen to these lessons on your computer or iPhone. The pronunciation starts out clear and slow so it’s a good way to practice listening for syllable stress in medical words including: hospital, diagnosis, emergency, chronic. The podcasts also bring your attention to 

Read more →

When it comes to American English pronunciation, one common problem is the letter A. Why is the letter A so problematic? Well…. When you are speaking American English, the letter A has three sounds; /ae/ as in black, /ey/ as in  grey and /ə/ as in mustard. In my work teaching the American accent to international

Read more →

In my accent reduction coaching program I work with many IT professionals. They CONtact me because they realize that their clients (and sometimes their colleagues) don’t always understand what they are saying in the workplace. Their breakdowns in communication occur with both technical terms and in everyday phrases. Here is some of the advice that

Read more →

I work on American English pronunciation and accent reduction with Arabic speaking professionals from different parts of the world including Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These professionals need to make the following adjustments in order to speak American English more clearly: 1. Slow down and speak using thought groups (phrases) and focus words 2. Learn

Read more →

Many of my Spanish. Arabic and French speaking accent reduction students have problems pronouncing the /dʒ/ sound. The /dʒ/ is an affricate sound. Click on affricate to see how the sound is pronounced here on the University of Iowa Fonetiks website. Here are a few words with the /dʒ/ sound. judge joke adjust manager budget educate exaggerate college Thanks to

Read more →

Here are two online tools that you can use to convert regular text into IPA or American Phonetic Alphabet symbols. The first one is nice because each sound symbol has an audio component. http://theaccentlab.com/ I also like the one below because it shows which syllable is stressed. When it comes to spoken English, stress is

Read more →

Do you think that spoken English should be learned word by word? Or do you think that it’s better to learn speaking using chunks or phrases? I like to teach individual words according to their syllable stress patterns and primary vowel sounds. That helps my students and clients be better understood right away. However, I also like to teach chunks

Read more →