Pronounce English Accurately

Video Text

Introduction

Welcome to 'Pronounce English Accurately', with me, Richard Stibbard.

If you're a learner of English and you find that people sometimes seem not always to understand what you say, if you sometimes need to repeat words, or if you're unsure as to how unfamilair English words should be pronounced... then you're in the right place!

This course will clear up the confusion, teaching you exactly how the sounds of English are made... and how they relate to spelling.

I'm a former lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Surrey and have a PhD in Phonetics - the science of speech sounds - from the University of Reading.

I've taught English pronunciation at all levels, from primary to postgraduate, in Cyprus, Turkey, Germany, Hong Kong and in the UK.

At the University of Cyprus I taught undergraduate and postgraduate students, and at the University of Reading I taught phonetics to postgraduate language pathology students. Later, at the University of Surrey, I trained postgraduate English language teachers in how to teach pronunciation.

I've also taught on the Summer Course in English Phonetics run by University College London, and I've worked with some of the leading phoneticians and pronunciation specialists in the UK.

In this course, you will gain an overt awareness of what your speech organs are doing and how they produce each of the different sounds of English.

I will teach you the International Phonetic Alphabet as used in pronunciation dictionaries so that you can look up any words you are unsure of, and, very importantly, I will relate these transcriptions closely to English spelling throughout the course.

Throughout the course I use large images, based on x-rays, depicting the positions of the organs of speech for each sound, as well as close-up camera shots when they're useful to show the actions of the speech organs in detail.

From these and from my descriptions, you will learn how to describe speech sounds and become better able to distinguish similar sounds from one another.

Interspersed between the lessons are interactive perception exercises - these are for you to test whether you can hear the difference between the various sounds - if you can't hear the difference, you can't make it accurately!

It actually amazes me that we all speak at least one language and most of the world's population speaks more than one, often many more, yet the average person has little or no accurate knowledge of how speech sounds are made, and cannot even begin to describe their production.

Making speech sounds, and trying to make the unfamilair sounds of foreigh languages, is such an integral part of all our lives as humans that it's truly astonishing that only a tiny number of specialists have any idea of what's actually going on inside our mouths when we speak.

We should all be able to identify speech sounds accurately and be able to say that a sound we hear is, for instance, a labiodental sound rather than a bilabial one, and to be able to describe where and how any given vowel sound is made with reasonable accuracy.

But generally people are very bad at doing this.

Let me remedy this for you, so you can learn exactly what our vocal tract is doing when we produce spoken language.

This knowledge will make your learning of English much more efficient as you will be able to pronounce every word in the language accurately and confidently. No longer will your spoken English put you at risk of being misunderstood or looking less than professional.

The course will also be highly valuable for learning any other languages you tackle as a knowledge of how our speech organs make the various sounds is transferable to any other language you learn.

I want to teach you, to help you improve your pronunciation and your listening skills, so hit the enrol button, and join me inside!