The Center for Confident American English Communication

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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I just discovered a great free resource called Spoken Skills. This website has audio examples of most of the American English vowel and consonant sounds. There are also short audio lessons for learning idioms speaking at business meetings. This is an excellent site so be sure to check it out! Related posts Best Accent Training

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When you are speaking American English always remember to stress last names more than first names. For example: Bill Clinton –> CLINton is stressed Barak Obama–> oBAma is stressed Jennifer Lopez–>LOpez is stressed The same goes for place names. Here are are few examples: New York–>York is stressed North Carolina–> caroLIna is stressed Stress the

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This week I’ve had several students ask me to explain the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. Although I am not an expert on this subject I do use IPA symbols with my students including the symbols for: the schwa vowel sound /ə/ the voiced th sound /ð/ the voiceless th sound /θ the tapped t

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This excellent activity site called Train Your Accent combines both listening and pronunciation practice using everyday language that students can incorporate in their daily life. Topics include cooking, cell phones, job hunting and restaurants. Each lesson has audio, a transcript, a reduced speech transcript and comprehension activities. You can use this site to improve your

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American English has about 15 different vowel sounds. Some of these sounds are considered short and others are considered to be long. Here is a list of long vowel sounds in American English. If you are a non native English speaker who wants to improve your American English vowel sounds in order to reduce your

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