The Center for Confident American English Communication

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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One very useful American English pronunciation tip I give my clients is this- When a conversation breaks down, think about the most important word in your message. This is called the focus word. Repeat that word again. But this time be careful to lengthen the  main vowel in that word. Use a slightly  higher pitch

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If you learned some new American English pronunciation and accent reduction tips here on my blog why not add this blog to your bookmarks? That way you can refer to it more often AND you can help me out. Bookmarking tells the powers at Google and Yahoo that you find my information valuable. By the

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I know that many of you are planning to improve your American English in 2012. You may be looking for a good American accent audio course. I’ve bought and used two of these courses… so let me tell you about them. The first one that I  recommend is called Best Accent Training. I like this

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Learning American English syllable stress patterns can be problematic if you don’t know the patterns. Here are two patterns that are fairly common: In words ending with the suffixes ion, ity, ic, ical, ian, ial, tion & ious we typically stress the FIRST syllable BEFORE the suffix. inVAsion fanTAStic fiNANcial GLORious In words ending with

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