The Center for Confident American English Communication

Good listening skills are one of the first steps to changing your accent! One key step in improving your accent is learning to notice American English speech sounds and patterns. For example: I typically find that my accent reduction clients are not aware of the schwa vowel sound. This is the reduced vowel sound found

Read more →

Here’s a great question that I received this week. Q: I have trouble pronouncing words that contain groups of consonants. Why is this and what can I do to change this? A: American English has lots of consonant clusters, groups of 2 or 3 consonants that occur together with no vowels in between. Consonant clusters

Read more →

This week I’ve noticed that many of my accent reduction coaching clients have problems pronouncing the word ‘been‘. We don’t pronounce this word with an /iy/ sound! This vowel sound in this word is /ɛ/. It is the same vowel sound in the word red or in the male name Ben. Even though been is

Read more →

Many non-native English speakers including Chinese, Vietnamese & Spanish speakers have a tendency to drop word final consonants such as the S in words such as: boys, washes and stops. Dropping word final sounds both contributes to your accent and creates grammatical errors that will confuse American listeners. Keep in mind that word final S

Read more →

This week someone sent me a question about the sounds of the letter A. In spoken American English  the letter A has a variety of sounds. The letter A can sound like /ae/ as in black The letter A can sound like /ey/ as in gray The letter A can sound like /ɑ/ as in

Read more →

When you are speaking American English, there are many consonants  that don’t always sound like you expect them to. Here is an example. When a word that ends with an /s/ or /z/ sound is followed by a word that starts with a /y/ sound the linked blended sound is a /sh/. Examples include: that’s

Read more →

This is my fourth and last post explaining why you have an accent when you speak American English. Today I am going to write about sound substitution or approximation. When  speaking English, non native speakers often substitute a sound they are familiar with from their own language for an English sound. For example, Russian speakers

Read more →

This is Part 3 of a series of posts that describe why you have an accent when you speak American English. In the past two posts I wrote about syllable stress and the duration of vowel sounds. Today I will write about voiced and voiceless consonant sounds. Using voiceless consonant sounds instead of voiced consonant

Read more →

This week I am writing about why you have an accent when you speak English.  Yesterday I wrote about syllable stress and intonation. Today I will talk about the importance of lengthening certain vowel sounds. When you are speaking English you must lengthen the vowel sounds that occur in stressed syllables. You must also lengthen

Read more →

Many highly educated international professionals read and write English extremely well. However, when they speak English they have an accent that causes communication problems. There are a number of factors that contribute to accented speech. In my posts over the next few days I am going to describe five factors that may be causing you

Read more →