The Center for Confident American English Communication

This is Part 3 of my series that describes why you have an accent when you speak American English. In the past two posts I wrote about the importance of syllable stress and lengthening vowel sounds. You may want to go back and read those posts if you haven’t done that already. ☛ Today I’ll

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In my accent reduction coaching course I work with international professionals from China, Turkey, France, India, New Zealand and Japan. Most of my clients have told me that they sometimes have a difficult time understanding the American accent. ✔ Do you ever have that problem? ☹ What does the American accent sound like to you?

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Perhaps you have heard people say that intonation is the melody or the music ♬ of spoken American English. Spoken English sounds melodic because English speakers use different types of intonation or pitch patterns when saying phrases and sentences. These intonation patterns are extremely important to use because they convey meaning. ✔ If you are

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Many of the people who I work with in my accent reduction coaching program learned to speak English word by word. I’ve found this to be particularly true for Chinese and Japanese speakers. North Americans don’t speak word by word though…they speak is phrases or “chunks of speech”.✔ One of my Japanese clients recently told me that

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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 type of miscommunication often happens to non native speakers. In order to change this, you need to learn how to use American English intonation patterns. So,

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North American English speakers speak in phrases. In pronunciation and accent reduction classes you will hear these phrases referred to as thought groups or intonation groups. Thought groups are sequences of words that have one prominent word. This is called a content word or a focus word. Thought groups are set off by short pauses

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Even if you pronounce all of your American English vowel and consonant sounds clearly, you will have a difficult time communicating with native English speakers effectively if you don’t use the correct intonation patterns. Your speech patterns may sound rather neutral (or even sarcastic) to American listeners. This can contribute to misunderstandings! Most Chinese, Filipino,

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In my accent reduction coaching program, I work with many Spanish speaking clients. These include international professionals from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Puerto Rico.  While each person has a slightly different accent, they all have problems with these five features of spoken English: The /I/ sound as in fill & difficult The /ae/ sound as

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Every day, people from around the world visit my American English pronunciation blog. Hello everyone! I’m very pleased to “see you” and I value your visits! ☼ Many of you blog readers email me to ask questions about spoken English. ….one topic you are very curious about is American English intonation patterns. GOOD QUESTION!! Let’s

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Lots of people stop by my blog each day to find information about American English intonation patterns. Here in the U.S. we use several types of intonation patterns when we speak. These include; rising-falling intonation, rising intonation, continuation rise, series intonation and tag question intonation. In order to use intonation patterns correctly, you need to:

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