The Center for Confident American English Communication

As an accent reduction coach who works with many international professionals, I understand that one of the most confusing aspects of spoken English is not always the ability to say a sound…. …it’s often the lack of uniformity between spelling and sounds. This is especially true for American vowel sounds. When I work with my clients,

Read more →

This week several of my clients asked me about the rules for using reduced speech. This is an important question! First of all, what is reduced speech? In spoken American English, reduced speech is the way that native speakers compact words together. This often involves linking and using the schwa vowel sound. Native speakers like

Read more →

Lot’s of people ask me about books for learning the American accent and American English pronunciation. I’ve added three of my recommended books to this slideshow. Today I’m featuring these 3 books because they are easy to understand, have good audio and are very affordable. Take a look at my selections here. I’ve used all

Read more →

When I teach my American accent clients to articulate the 15 American English vowel sounds I always use a tool called the Color Vowel Chart. This visual tool helps my clients to see and feel the American English vowels. I love the tool and so do my students and clients. When I teach teachers from

Read more →

Gabe from towerofbabelfish.com just sent me his video tutorial on the IPA or International Phonetic Alphabet. If you’ve been wondering how the IPA works to describe the sounds of words you’ll be very pleased with the content of this video. This is just the first of a series of videos that he plans to record

Read more →

This article from the journal, Scientific American, describes some current research on how the human brain reacts when it hears a foreign accent. Do you think that speaking with a strong accent reduces your credibility? Research indicates that speaking with an accent that is difficult to understand, reduce one’s credibility in the eyes and ears

Read more →

The Color Vowel Chart is an excellent visual tool that you can use to learn or TEACH the 15 vowels sounds in North American English. The hard copies of the chart are really nice; colorful and laminated with color words and IPA symbols. There are teaching activities you can use on the back of the

Read more →

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

Read more →

Here’s a great question that I received from one of my accent reduction clients this week. Q: I have trouble pronouncing words that contain groups of consonants. Why is this and what can I do to change this? A: American English has lots of consonant clusters, groups of 2 or 3 consonants that occur together

Read more →

This is for all of you English pronunciation teachers who are looking for activities to teach pronunciation. One book that I’ve found very helpful is Beverly Beisbier’s Sounds Great. Each chapter ends with several fully developed activities for pair practice. These pair practice activities are excellent for getting your students to practice what they learned

Read more →