The Center for Confident American English Communication

One common pronunciation problem  for non-native American English speakers is the pronunciation of the words can and can’t. Here are a couple of accent tips that will help you pronounce these words correctly. 1. When you say the word can’t you should give it extra stress or emphasis (like all negative auxiliary verbs). 2. The

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Linguistic research indicates that the most common sound in spoken English is the schwa vowel sound. This is because native English speakers pronounce the vowels in most reduced syllables with the schwa sound. The phonetic symbol for schwa is /ə/. Here is an example. When I say my name, Susan, the first syllable is stressed so

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Those of you who read my blog frequently know that using syllable stress correctly is one of the very best ways to improve your comprehensibility when you speak English.  That said, here are a few syllable stress patterns for compound words that you may find useful. Compound nouns are stressed on the first word in

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Haitian Creole speakers and French speakers have some of the same problems with spoken English. One of these is the tendency to delete the /h/ sound at the beginning of words. Word initial /h/ is almost always pronounced in American English. That means that the /h/ must be articulated clearly in words such as: hat,

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Here are a couple of tips for French speakers who want to improve their American English pronunciation. 1. Pronounce S at the end of English words. Word final s is always pronounced in English. Word final S often has a /z/ sound as in the words: boys, girls & dogs. The S may also have a

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One key feature of good spoken English is syllable stress. In spoken English one syllable is each word is stressed. The vowel in the stressed syllable is lengthened and pronounced with a higher pitch. Spoken French does not employ syllable stress in this way. French syllables are evenly stressed until you reach the last syllable

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Like many people I love the sound of the French language and I wish that I could speak it better! One difference between American English pronunciation and French pronunciation is that in English we always pronounce s at the end of a word. French students learning English often forget to say that sound. You must

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