The Center for Confident American English Communication

Both British English and American English have a vowel sound that you’ve probably never heard of. This sound is called the schwa sound.  It looks like this /ə/. Native English speakers use the reduced schwa sound to create rhythm in words and sentences. Even though most native and non native English speakers are not aware

Read more →

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

Read more →

One tricky word that many of my accent reduction clients have trouble pronouncing is the word ‘machine’. The first syllable is reduced and the ‘a’ has a schwa vowel sound. The second syllable is stressed and the ‘i’ has an /iy/ sound as in ‘green’. Here it is in a sentence. Stressed syllables are capitalized-

Read more →

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

Read more →

One common pronunciation problem  for non-native American English speakers is the pronunciation of the words can and can’t. Here are a couple of accent tips that will help you pronounce these words correctly. 1. When you say the word can’t you should give it extra stress or emphasis (like all negative auxiliary verbs). 2. The

Read more →

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

Read more →

One key feature of good spoken English is syllable stress. In spoken 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 stressed until you reach the last syllable

Read more →

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. Related posts Why

Read more →