The Center for Confident American English Communication

In my accent reduction coaching program I work with many IT professionals. They CONtact me because they realize that their clients (and sometimes their colleagues) don’t always understand what they are saying in the workplace. Their breakdowns in communication occur with both technical terms and in everyday phrases. Here is some of the advice that

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When you are speaking American English it is really important to recognize the difference between voiced sounds and voiceless sounds! A voiced sound causes your vocal chords to vibrate. A voiceless sound does not cause your vocal chords to vibrate. American English has 8 voiced/voiceless consonant pairs such as /z/ & /s/ and /v/ & /f/. Here are a couple of examples:

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I spend most of my time teaching one on one accent reduction courses to non native American English speakers. (Posting on my blog is just a hobby.) I call this “accent reduction coaching” and I teach primarily over Skype video. In my course I teach you the syllable stress rules, linking rules, intonation patterns and

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Did you know that there are some great resources for learning American English pronunciation online on my blog? These resources include: The University of Iowa Phonetics The Merck Medical Pronunciations The Color Vowel Chart A syllable stress game from Oxford The BBC page on the schwa vowel sound These are great audio resources that you

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People often send me email messages in the middle of the night. Why is this? It’s because they had a communication problem at work. This communication problem is bothering them so much that they can’t sleep. So they are up in the middle of the night, searching the internet for a solution. They know that

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Back in 1999, linguistics professor Steven Weinberger at George Mason University created a cool tool called the Speech Accent Archive The archive contains 1,500 recordings of people from around the world reading the same paragraph in English. There are recordings of both native English speakers and non native English speakers along with their age, gender

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I have to be honest with you. Learning a new accent is not something that happens overnight! Accent reduction  is a process of listening, noticing sounds and patterns, learning accent reduction techniques and applying those techniques in real life situations. My clients sometimes ask me how actors are able to learn to speak with different

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One tricky aspect of American English is the correct use and pronunciation of phrasal verbs. In order to pronounce phrasal verbs correctly you need to employ both linking and syllable stress strategies. Examples of commonly used phrasal verbs include: break up take off turn it on work out Here is a great audio story on

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When speaking American English, most Spanish speakers have problems pronouncing the /I/ vowel sound. In order to make this sound correctly, your tongue is forward and your facial muscles are relaxed. Here are some practice sentences. Where does he live? Fill it up.  Could you fill it up? Give her a gift. I want to

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In spoken American English we use different types of intonation and pitch to express meaning and emotion. Since you can’t learn about intonation without listening to native speakers, you MUST use audio courses or CDs to practice this skill. One of the best ways to learning and practice the rhythms and intonations of spoken American

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