Pronounciation

To improve your English you need to get a better pronunciation. In order to communicate properly when we speak.

Objective:

• Understand the systematic differences in the English' pronunciation; monitor your own speech and become aware of ways in which you can improve the intelligibility of your own spoken English.
•  Use the words appropriately and sentences; make use of transcription in dictionaries. Each lesson introduces an aspect of English pronunciation and many include short tasks for practice. You can see videos to understand better the lesson. 

What is Pronunciation?

Pronunciation (noun): the way in which we pronounce a word
pronounce (verb): to make the sound of a word

"Pronunciation" refers to the way in which we make the sound of words.

To pronounce words, we push air from our lungs up through our throat and vocal chords, through our mouth, past our tongue and out between our teeth and lips. (Sometimes air also travels through our nose.)

To change the sound that we are making, we mainly use the muscles of our mouth, tongue and lips to control the shape of our mouth and the flow of air. If we can control the shape of our mouth and the flow of air correctly, then our pronunciation is clearer and other people understand us more easily.

Speakers of different languages tend to develop different muscles of the mouth for pronunciation. When we speak a foreign language, our muscles may not be well developed for that language, and we will find pronunciation more difficult. By practicing the foreign language pronunciation, our muscles develop and pronunciation improves.

As well as creating correct vowel and consonant sounds using the muscles of our mouth, tongue and lips, there are other important aspects of pronunciation, including:

•  word stress - emphasis on certain syllables in a word
• sentence stress - emphasis on certain words in a sentence
•  linking - joining certain words together
•   intonation - the rise and fall of our voice as we speak

For this we need to know the phonetics.