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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Many people have emailed me this week looking for some free American English conversations and dialogs. Here is a site that features thousands of words and phrases as well as many dialogs. The speakers speak rather slowly though. Don’t expect American English speakers to speak at this pace! Here is a link to the site-http://englishspeak.com/
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One fun and effective way to learn the rhythm of spoken English is to sing songs. In my pronunciation classes last year I used this website called KaraokeParty to teach American English songs to the students and they found that this was very helpful way to practice phrasing, linking and vowel lengthening. To find the
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Randall of esl-lab has added some short movie clips to his website. These are called Video Snapshots and they provide video content that relates to the other listening activities available on his site. As always Randall’s new activities are excellent! If you want practice listening you can check them out here- American English Listening Practice
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Oxford University Press has some online pronunciation games that you may like to try. There are pronunciation games for vowels, consonants and syllable stress. The games have British English audio but the consonants with voiced and voiceless sounds and many of the syllable stress patterns are the same as in American English. I just tried
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If you are looking for English audio that you can listen to in order to help you learn pronunciation you may want to check out this site called English Language Listening Lab Online. The site has almost 1000 audio and video files you can use. There are also games and activities. I used to use
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English Language podcasts are an excellent way to listen to and imitate the syllable stress, sentence and intonation patterns of spoken American English. Jennifer Lebedev, (often recognized as Jennifer ESL) has created a series of audio podcasts that you can listen to. Some of the titles include: Saying No, Personal Finances and Having a Phone
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One of my most thoughtful students wrote this week to tell me that he has a very difficult time understanding American English speakers. In response to his concern I will explain a few listening strategies you can use to increase your understanding of spoken English. 1. Anticipate and predict what might be said Before going into
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One accent reduction technique that I recommend to the students in my accent reduction classes is to listen for the syllable stress, sentence stress and intonation patterns used by American English speakers. You must practice listening to these patterns in order to use them like American English speakers do. Learning to use syllable stress, sentence
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There are lots of sites on the web these days where you can find idioms with audio files. Click the link to find a comprehensive site that features 423 English idioms. This is a great tool for practicing your American English pronunciation! Practice American English pronunciation with Idioms. Related posts When O is Pronounced With
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