The Center for Confident American English Communication

I often find that the strategies that I teach my accent reduction coaching clients are the same strategies that are used in public speaking. For both accent reduction and effective public speaking you need to: Warm up your voice ✔ Prepare your material with marks for emphasis, pauses & stops (breathing) ✔ Rehearse what you

Read more →

Here’s some interesting news (or perhaps an opinion) about the Indian English accent vs. the Filipino English accent. An article in the Economist Magazine states; “The main reason for the success of the Philippine call centres is that workers speak English with a neutral accent and are familiar with American idioms—which is exactly what their American

Read more →

This week, one of my Skype accent reduction coaching clients was a bit surprised to realize that when the letter G occurs at the beginning of a word, it can have a soft sound or a hard sound. Hard G /g/ Soft G /ʤ/ He asked me if there were rules for the American pronunciation of

Read more →

Most American born people say the word kilometer with stress on the second syllable. kilo→meter They use the same syllable stress pattern when they say the following words: thermo→meter para→meter peri→meter baro→meter odo→meter Many of my accent reduction coaching clients, (IT professionals, scientists, MBA students) never learned to use these patterns. Subsequently, they say these

Read more →

The people who I work with in my accent reduction program often ask me to help them with the pronunciation of the word exactly. ✔ This is a tricky word to pronounce! Do you know why? One reason is because the letter X has 2 different pronunciations. Most people don’t realize that!  ☝ Here are

Read more →

☆ Many people ask me for TIPS on how to practice the accent skills they are learning. ☆ One very effective technique is to REHEARSE what you think you might say in a given situation.☝ Let me explain what I mean…. Before going into a situation where you’ll be conversing with native English speakers, predict

Read more →

One key skill that I teach in my accent reduction courses is how to speak using American English intonation. ♬ Intonation is difficult to learn from a book.  You really need direct instruction on how to hear American intonation and apply it correctly! While there are rules you can learn about intonation including: Rising/falling intonation⤵

Read more →

Many of my accent reduction coaching clients ask me to teach them strategies for making “small talk” with ease and fluency. Small talk such as greetings, talking about the weather, sports…these are all critical skills for socializing and getting to know people. I teach my clients these skills using special intonation dialogs. These are fun

Read more →

Here is a nice graphic that will show you a KEY TIP for speaking American English! Do you know and apply these basic syllable stress rules when you speak English? Read the graphic carefully to see how Americans stress syllables in words when they speak. You simply must apply these rules in order to speak

Read more →

Many of my Asian & Latin American accent reduction coaching clients program have trouble hearing & pronouncing the ed sounds that occurs at the end of past tense verbs. When you DON’t pronounce the ed sound, it effects both your grammar & your American accent. If you are working in a professional position, you really don’t

Read more →