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Here are a few tips to improve English pronunciation. But before we get into that which is the focus of this article, let's step back a bit and look at the whole scenario of what goes into helping a non-native English speaker or anyone for that matter, land his or her first ESL job. Firstly you have to honestly look at your weaknesses and what you need to work on the most to ace the interview.
There are various aspects to it like:
So let's take a nice hard look at how to improve English pronunciation. What you should do. What you shouldn't and what is a waste of your time.
Short term and long term goals need to be thought of before you go into your interview. For example should your primary focus be on grammar or your accent. One very common mistake that non-native English speakers make is the speed at which they speak.
In order to improve your English pronunciation, it's important to remember to speak slowly. You need to give yourself the time to get your mouth into position to clearly enunciate. It would be good to understand that the thought appears in the mind first. The mouth movement lags behind the thought. So in order to improve English pronunciation give your mouth time to form the correct position to make the sound as closely to your native target as possible.
If your pronunciation or accent is heavy speaking faster won't help anything, in fact it will have the opposite effect of irritating the listener. The take away is speed of speaking isn't directly correlated to fluency. To improve English pronunciation practicing actually speaking out loud when you answers typical questions that you believe they may ask you.
Here is a nice little pronunciation poem. The speaker is male and it covers many different sounds in 1:14 seconds. It comes complete with a transcript so you can read a long with it.
Containing long vowels, short vowels, consonant blends etc. If you can read along with this poem and can correctly pronounce most of it you are well on your way to having excellent pronunciation!
With any given sound the shape of your mouth conveyed by your lips will be different so when practicing a sound you'll need to get your mouth into the correct position to make that sound.
Another critical aspect to improve English pronunciation is to be aware of where your tongue should be when you are practicing. Depending on the sound your tongue will be in the back of the mouth, in the center or in the front of the mouth.
And lastly is your throat. Some sounds originate in the front of the mouth while others come from the throat or are much more guttural. For example the consonant sounds "t", "p" and a host of others come from the front whereas sounds "g" and "d" come from the throat meaning you will feel your throat vibrate when you enunciate the sound. You can check this by simply feeling your throat as you practice it. So for example if you are saying "g" and you aren't feeling any vibration you aren't making the sound correctly.
Mirroring the speech of a native English speaker can improve the pronunciation of ESL learners who have pronunciation patterns that have become deeply ingrained in the learner.
It forces learners to focus on the more natural part of sounding native i.e. intonation, stress, and rhythm. So without reading it, you just listen to it and "wrap yourself up" in the sound and intonation, stress points of the sentence.
Here Are Some Tips on How to Further Improve English Pronunciation
Psychological issues and doubts also play a role of obstructing learning to improve your pronunciation. Removing or reducing the impact of these problems are easier said than done.
Many Struggle With:
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