The Center for Confident American English Communication

Here are two online tools that you can use to convert regular text into IPA or American Phonetic Alphabet symbols. The first one is nice because each sound symbol has an audio component. http://theaccentlab.com/ I also like the one below because it shows which syllable is stressed. When it comes to spoken English, stress is

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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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Many of you have written and asked me questions about the IPA and how to read phonetic transcriptions of English words. I did some searching on the web and found this page from the Antimoon site. The page shows you how to read and write phonetic transcriptions. Each word and transcription has an audio recording

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I receive lots of requests from students for IPA charts and information about the pronunciation of American English vowel and consonant sounds. Here is some basic information. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system that was developed to represent the sounds of spoken languages. The system uses characters from the Latin and Greek alphabets.

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Continuing the discussion on the International Phonetic Alphabet, I like this IPA chart from esl-lounge.com. The 44 phoneme symbols are large and easy to read. However, there is no audio. If you are an English pronunciation teacher or graduate student who needs to type IPA symbols into your documents check out Type IPA. This is

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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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