The Center for Confident American English Communication

This week in my accent reduction coaching classes two people asked me how to pronounce the word “the”. Here are 3 techniques you must follow in order to pronounce THE correctly. Technique # 1. THE begins with the voiced Th consonant sound. To make the voiced Th sound you must place the tip of your

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This week many people have contacted me to ask about the schwa vowel sound. This VERY COMMON vowel sound is found in both American and British English. The symbol for schwa is /ə/. The sound it makes is a weak “uh”. While this little “uh” may not seem like an important sound, it is…in fact

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Good listening skills are one of the first steps to changing your accent! One key step in improving your accent is learning to notice American English speech sounds and patterns. For example: I typically find that my accent reduction clients are not aware of the schwa vowel sound. This is the reduced vowel sound found

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When  American English speakers converse informally with friends and family they often use informal pronunciation patterns. Pronunciation and accent reduction books refer to this type of language as “reduced speech”. Reduced speech usually involves using the schwa vowel sound /ə/ for the vowels in reduced syllables. Here are a few examples: want to sounds like

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When you are speaking American English it is very important for you to use syllable stress correctly. One reason is because English has many heteronyms. Heteronyms are two words that are spelled identically. The way the words are pronounced determines their meaning. One good example of this is the word: ADDRESS. When you say the

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One key feature of good spoken English is using the correct syllable stress. That’s because in spoken American 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

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BBC Learning English is a fantastic multimedia site that you can use to learn English pronunciation. Of course the accents in the audio and video samples are British but many of the rules for spoken English such as the schwa sound, voicing, linking and consonant clusters apply to American spoken English as well. ×