The Center for Confident American English Communication

Do you ever feel like people misinterpret your meaning when you speak with them in American English? Have people commented that your speech sounds blunt, flat or even unfriendly? This has happened to several of my accent reduction coaching clients. When this happens I teach them how to use American English intonation patterns. Intonation is

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I spend most of my time teaching one on one accent reduction courses to non native American English speakers. (Posting on my blog is just a hobby.) I call this “accent reduction coaching” and I teach primarily over Skype video. In my course I teach you the syllable stress rules, linking rules, intonation patterns and

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One of the most frequent questions that  people ask about accent reduction is: ‘how long will it take me to reduce my accent?” Here is my response to that very important question. Most people will never sound like a native American English speaker, but everyone is capable of reducing their accent and making their speech

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Last week, I was working on vowel sound articulation with one of my accent reduction coaching students. We were working on the tense /iy/ sound in the words feet & leave and the lax /I/ sound in the words fit & live. My student, a project manager at an international communications company, said “but Susan,

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A couple of days ago I explained that heteronyms are two words that are spelled identically. The way the words are stressed determines the meaning. One good example is the word: OBJECT. The way you use syllable stress say the word ‘object’ changes the meaning of the word. When the stress is on the first

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This week I found an excellent American English Pronunciation Audio Course on the web. In this audio course instructor Charles Becker teaches you American English vowel & consonant sounds, syllable stress & intonation as well as linking and connected speech. This is a very complete course and I advise you to check it out! You

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From all that I’ve heard, the push to learn English in Korea is huge these days. This article from the Korea Times reports that 39% of recent college graduates want to find jobs with big companies where spoken English is frequently a prerequisite for the job. Some job interviews are done with native English speakers

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Immigrant professionals are taking classes at the University of Minnesota to improve their accents and communication skills. The director of the program says, ”We as Americans tend to make some judgments and assumptions about people’s credibility, their expertise and their education based on how we perceive them communicating,”  Participants understand that as adult learners they will

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