The Center for Confident American English Communication

Here’s a great question that I received 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 with no vowels in between. Consonant clusters

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In my work as an American English pronunciation and accent reduction teacher I buy and test many of the books, CDs software and audio courses that are available for students and teachers to use. Here are my favorite products for students: 1. Mastering the American Accent by Lisa Mosjin 2. Best Accent Training mp3 Audio

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It’s good to keep in mind that the English language is continually changing. Even though grammar rules don’t change any more, English vocabulary and pronunciation are always evolving with the culture. Here is a link to an easy to read history of the English language. Those of you who are really interested in the History

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Psychologists at Bristol University have found that the developing brain undergoes a period of “programming” in infancy. This programming sets the stage for a life long ability to recognize sounds. Babies who hear only English are left unable to distinguish between subtly different sounds used in other languages. Babies exposed to multiple languages during their

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This PDF document from Pearson Longman Publishers outlines the pronunciation concepts that teachers need to address when teaching English pronunciation classes. Some of these key features include: working on individual sounds or phonemes word stress (also called syllable stress) sentence stress & intonation teaching students to use phonemic scripts using minimal pair exercises Click here

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I know that many of my readers are people who teach American English Pronunciation. For my fellow teachers I want to you to know that I recently published a book review of an excellent book called Teaching American English Pronunciation, an easy to read primer on how to teach American English pronunciation. One of the

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I just found a new website called EFL.NET. The site has a great feature that allows you to practice your American English by listening to American songs as you read a transcript with the words. To listen to the songs choose: ComAudio and then choose Songs from the drop down menu. The songs are sung

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