The Center for Confident American English Communication

The sounds of the letters S & Z are often confusing for students of American English pronunciation. Here are a few tips for pronouncing these sounds correctly. Tongue position The /s/ and /z/ sounds are made with the same tongue position. The tip of the tongue is behind your upper gum ridge. The tongue is

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When Americans talk they stress the CONTENT and FOCUS words in a sentence. That’s because these words are the most important for sentence meaning. English speakers will reduce the function words in a sentence because these words are not key to meaning. In spoken American English each sentence or phrase contains: A Focus word-the most

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Spoken English can be mysterious. Since English is not a phonetic language there is not always a one-on-one relationship between the letters in the English alphabet and spoken sounds. The written and spoken language don’t always seem to work together very well! This can cause problems when you want to pronounce English words from a text!

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I know that many of my readers are people who teach American English Pronunciation. For my fellow teachers I want to you to know that I recently published a book review of an excellent book called Teaching American English Pronunciation, an easy to read primer on how to teach American English pronunciation. One of the

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I finally took a closer look at the American English pronunciation videos created by the people at Fun Easy English. I had come across these on the web many times but I never took the time to check out the site. I was really quite impressed with the number of video lessons they provide for

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English Club has some of the best explanations on how to improve your American English pronunciation using word stress and sentence stress. The explanations they provide for these key pronunciation areas are very clear and most of them include some audio. I frequently recommend English Club to my students who like to do extra pronunciation

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Randall Davis, the professor who created the well known ESL-lab website has a new site called EZ Slang. This site features American English audio dialogs that include common idioms and slang phrases. Each dialog is recorded by American English speakers in an everyday conversational style. If you can mimic the dialogs it will really help

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In my pronunciation and accent reduction classes I work with many people who speak Spanish and Filipino as their first language. One American English vowel sound that both these groups have trouble pronouncing is the /iy/ sound as in the word “sheep”. They often confuse this sound with the /I/ vowel sound as in the

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Many people have emailed me during the past two weeks asking for websites that have American English vowel sounds with audio. I found this site, developed by Dr. Emily Chen, that has sound files for both vowel and consonant minimal pair exercises. It’s quite good because it contrasts all the difficult vowel and consonant sounds.

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Across Japan students have been using the speeches of President Barack Obama to improve their English communication skills. They are using the speeches to learn the intonation of American English. Watch the short video here.  Students Practice American English Pronunciation Related posts American English Pronunciation Videos (0) Vowel Sounds in American English (0) Use Idioms

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