Strategies to Improve Your English Pronunciation

hey it's Anne Marie with speak confident English and this week I have a really special lesson for you a lot of my students get frustrated and tired because when they speak somebody always says I'm sorry what was that or sorry I didn't understand you could you repeat that hearing those words and those questions again and again can get really discouraging and it makes you feel like maybe you're not communicating correctly in English or maybe you have a really strong accent so this week I wanted to chat with one of my friends and fellow English teachers Foster Foster is a specialist in pronunciation he's the founder of a website and podcast called English new ecru and he's one of my favorite people to talk to so in this interview we talked all about the role of pronunciation and what steps you can take to start improving pronunciation and feel more confident in how you sound in English and once you've finished watching I would love to hear from you let me know in the comments one thing that you've learned in this lesson or if you have a new goal for your pronunciation and you're going to take one step to improve it what are you going to do I would love to hear from you and you can do that in the comment section just below the video or at the end of the online lesson [Music] today I'm chatting with foster who is the founder of English new a crew and we're gonna talk all about pronunciation in a little bit but foster before we talk about pronunciation and things like fixing intonation or working on your accent will you tell me a little bit more about you who you are and what you do yeah absolutely so first thanks for having me it's always a pleasure to talk to you so my name is Foster I'm the founder of English - a crew we specifically work with brazilians and more specifically we work with helping Brazilians with their pronunciation and we do that with an online course and we also have a daily podcast that is everyday talking about English which could be for anybody but it is specifically targeted for Brazilians awesome and how long is your daily podcast is it like five minutes every day or 15 minutes does it change there is a little bit of variation we normally try to keep it in between 10 and 20 minutes [Music] yeah that's normally the range but sometimes we go a little crazy and talk too much what kinds of topics do you usually focus on in your podcast hm pretty much anything under the Sun so I think we just recorded our two hundred and eightieth episode Wow so a lot sometimes we do really focus things like just on pronunciation or an entire week focusing on phrasal verbs but sometimes we just talk about the most recent Netflix show we watched or something and then we will have a conversation and when we see an opportunity for a teachable moment we'll try to insert some more specific teaching into deficit excellent so for anyone who's going to be watching this interview if they want to check out your podcast where can they find it enjoy snowy cruel calm so that is much easier just to cook very very simple absolutely so Foster I know that you focus specifically on Brazilians and work very much with helping Brazilians improve pronunciation but today we're going to talk a little bit more generally about the role of pronunciation for anyone who's watching no matter what language they speak or what country they're from and one of the first questions I wanted to ask you is a lot of students who have been studying English for years get really frustrated and tired because people always say I'm sorry I didn't understand you could you say that again or I'm sorry could you repeat that and after hearing that a lot it definitely gets discouraging and frustrating so I'm curious what advice would you have for someone who is feeling just tired and frustrated with hearing that comment again and again yeah so I think I would like to take this from two different approaches so first that's totally normal every language learner deals with that in the beginning I mean I know it's frustrating and the easiest way to overcome that obstacle is simply to have as many conversations as possible preferably in a safe space like with a teacher you trust or with a language partner that you have a good connection with and that really gives you a lot of confidence to when that situation happens to know how to react and not be discouraged by it so on one hand just know that it happens to everyone part of the process you're not alone and having more conversations really helps that I do think it's important to illustrate the difference between pronunciation and accent so just very generally I would describe pronunciation it's like the physical movements that we are producing with our mouths and our speech organs while we are speaking so if you have missed pronunciations that is something I would categorize as someone is really not understanding you and that is when you receive things like hey sorry could you repeat that or I don't understand what you said can you say it again and those are normally a little bit more discouraging like that's when people get really frustrated and then on the other hand you have accent which is much more connected to where you're from your intonation your stress your culture and if you just have some accent issues you will probably just receive questions like oh where are you from like you I hear a small accident when what are you doing in the u.s. something like that so I do think it's important to try to divide those two categories yeah I think that's really helpful and I'm curious so when someone wants comes to you or works with an English teacher and says I want to improve my pronunciation or I want to work on my accent where do you recommend that students start what's the most important first step when they want to make some of those improvements yeah so students learning English as a second language or third or fourth language I think the two most important places to start first is just recognizing conceptually that English is not a phonetic language which means our writing system the way right in English is not going to help your pronunciation so with that said you want to really pay attention to the phonetics the phonology the sound system the sounds we produce with our mouths so when you can kind of understand that idea that really really helps and then secondly every every language is composed of a certain number of sounds mm-hmm in linguistics we would call phonemes but we were just talking about individual sounds right and in each language you will have some sounds that exist in English and your native language and you will have sounds that exist in English that do not exist in your native language most likely those will be the most difficult and that's probably the best place to start mm-hmm-hmm so for someone that wants to start that process of understanding English phonemes recognizing our sounds how would you what would be the first step what would you recommend for them to do yeah first just like a very brief introduction to what phonetics phonology all of these things that we say these fancy words for but just sounds there are tons of resources online in general most people estimate that English is composed of between 42 and 44 sounds depending on what type of English dialect you're working with depending on how you count them so you can just look at which sounds are very familiar to you which sounds are more difficult to you we have specific lists for Brazilians and a lot of resources for that but another very good resource is pronunciation okay I'll share that link definitely it below the video yes they have every sound in English with examples with audio examples with different words different spellings very helpful do they also show how you should use your mouth or shape your mouth when making specific sounds not as in as much detail as I would prefer they do have like courses that may do that but with all the free resources I've seen they don't get that specific okay great so if someone starts there or someone says I want to start working on this today what are some strategies that you have found to be really successful that someone can use for example for five minutes today five minutes tomorrow and start making some progress on improving maybe their intonation working on stress or some of those sounds that are particularly difficult for them in English yeah so I think the easiest way to think about this is to really think about pronunciation as a physical activity so imagine if you were going to the gym or you are training any athletic sport or activity it's the same process like you have to go and train you have to put in the repetitions and that's where I would start just identifying things that are difficult for you so this could be a specific sound for example the th anybody coming from a Latin background will probably have a lot of difficulties with the th right so I'd understand how to produce that you're putting your tongue out of your mouth biting your tongue and then just trying that for five minutes a day and if you were training a new sound you will get tired just like going to the gym that's more specific pronunciation training like the basics with intonation and stress very similar you could use a lot of techniques like shadowing which is just repeating with native speakers perhaps start with the slower audio and I always recommend if you are willing and able to record yourself immediately day one so you can practice with audio but then listen to yourself speaking and you will hear the differences and it's not fun and it hurts in the beginning but it's super super effective absolutely absolutely you said something that I had brought a question to my mind and now I think I lost it unfortunately I have to think for a second but anyway I wanted to say I totally agree with that concept that when you start to practice and you're using your mouth in these different ways you you get physically tired you really hurt just like you go to the gym your mouth muscles and your tongue your cheeks might hurt a little bit I just told some students that last night we were working on connected speech and blending sounds together and how it can sound so funny when you've learned for so long to say words separately and suddenly you're trying to blend them together it definitely requires you to use your your mouth and your muscles a little bit differently yeah yeah absolutely I think there's like kind of a trap that a lot of language learners fall into that you really feel like you're studying but you're not necessarily learning and acquiring new knowledge and it's the same thing as any physical activity mm-hmm go to the gym kind of walk around maybe do the elliptical machine for like five minutes but if you don't feel something the next day like if you're not a little sore or sweaty and you're probably not making process and progress maybe and it's the same thing with languages right absolutely that's so true so I'm curious in your experience you've worked with so many students particularly on pronunciation and what are some of the signs of success or what are some of the things that your most successful students do that lead to that ultimate progress or improvement that they wanted to make yeah I think the first like most basic thing that we see all of our successful students have in common is kind of that epiphany moments that okay I am seeing a word on paper and I am trying to pronounce that word the way I see it and that is not working for me anymore so I need to pay attention to what what my mouth is doing and when you can make that transformative shift to focusing more on what your mouth is producing physically as opposed to what something on a piece of paper says that's like the first big step right I would say the second commonality that all of our students share is just the willingness to be uncomfortable mm-hmm like producing a new sound or speaking new words or speaking with a different intonation for the first time is extremely uncomfortable like you feel weird you feel like you're going to sound stupid and to embrace that discomfort is something that all of our best students have in common those two things you will be successful right right I was just it's so funny that you said that was just working with some students last night and we were talking about the difference between see you when we for example when we say goodbye we often say oh see you see you later or see ya just that tiny difference and I had a couple of students who said I know I hear native speakers say SIA all the time but it feels so strange for me and I feel like when I say it might be wrong because it's just so new and and so we were just getting some practice with some of those basic little changes that happen in English and the things that might feel uncomfortable at first but with time with practice it starts to become much more comfortable and normal yeah absolutely if something feels uncomfortable that it's probably a good sign that it's the right thing that you should be focusing on right absolutely well foster before we finish today is there anything else you'd like to share about working on pronunciation or what you do and how students can find you yeah I would just recommend to all students I know this is true in Brazil and almost all of Latin America and the majority of any language student I have encountered in my 10 years of teaching traditional English schools tend to there's a lack of resources and a lack of focus on pronunciation especially at the beginning and this happens for a lot of reasons primarily it's difficult to teach people how to use their mouths in different ways and it's much easier to study like in a book but I would really really recommend all students to at least be open to the idea of focusing more time and attention on pronunciation no matter what level your English is that because that's the first thing that people hear I guess humans we connect with people that sound some more to us so if you're serious about speaking fluently and connecting with people and making friends pronunciation is very important yeah absolutely so Foster I'm definitely going to include a link to your podcast and to the resource that you listed below this video anything else that I should link to the where students can find you know I think everything on the internet about us and what we do is in Galatia muqaam perfect yeah and if you've if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out via Google yeah all right thank you so much faster I appreciate it thanks Emory my pleasure [Music] you

Channel: Speak Confident English

Views: 111,596

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Id: sIPvsFT9g00

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019