Pronunciation and accent coaching

Everyone's goals for accent coaching are different. But in general, the goal is not achieving a 'better' accent, but reducing ambiguity and making conversation flow more easily and with less work for both you and other people.

The fundamentals of phonetic theory help you:

• know what to listen out for when learning new words
• understand why certain errors cause confusion
• improve your listening comprehension too!
  (Because you learn which parts of English speech are important.)

Dr Eden and her colleagues have found that students are really happy to learn the principles, because they almost never get taught in standard ESOL classes, and so the benefits of even small changes can start to pay off in improved clarity almost straight away.

Possible topics

Depending on you, we might cover any or all of:

• The 19 vowel sounds of (Standard Southern British) English, and how they (don't) match the 5 written vowel symbols.
  For example, hearing and producing the differences between 'bead', 'bid', 'beard', 'bared', and 'bed'.


• How to physically articulate English sounds, i.e. where to put your tongue and lips to clearly distinguish between similar sounds.
  For example, v and w, or d and th.


• Co-articulation: how pronunciation changes when certain sounds are put together.
  For example, the difference between 't' in 'tea' and 't' in 'tree' (the latter being closer to 'ch', because of how you move from one to the other).


• Intonation patterns: how the pitch of the words rises and falls across a phrase, and how changing the pattern of rises and falls changes meaning.
  
  Non-native intonation patterns can cause confusion, as the listener struggles to figure out the structure of the sentence. This usually means the speaker is asked to repeat, only for the listener to suddenly understand halfway through.
  Or they can cause misunderstanding of intent (e.g. the listener perceives accusation or sarcasm when a sentence was intended to be neutral).