As you go along, you'll notice that you're being asked to look at accent in a different way. You'll also realize that the grammar you studied before and this accent you're studying now are completely different. Part of the difference is that grammar and vocabulary are systematic and structured— the letter of the language. Accent, on the other hand, is free form, intuitive, and creative— more the spirit of the language. So, thinking of music, feeling, and flow, let your mouth relax into the American accent.
Can a person actually learn a new accent? Can classical musicians play jazz? If they practice, of course they can! For your American accent, it's just a matter of learning and practicing techniques this book and CD set will teach you.
It is up to you to use them or not. How well you do depends mainly on how open and willing you are to sounding different from the way you have sounded all your life. A very important thing you need to remember is that you can use your accent to say what you mean and how you mean it. Word stress conveys meaning through tone or feeling, which can be much more important than the actual words that you use.
We'll cover the expression of these feelings through intonation in the first lesson. You may have noticed that I talk fast and often run my words together. You've probably heard enough "English-teacher English"—where That's why on the CDs we're going to talk just like the native speakers that we are, in a normal conversational tone.
Native speakers may often tell people who are learning English to "slow down" and to "speak clearly. If you speak fairly quickly and with strong intonation, you will be understood more easily. To illustrate this point, you will hear a Vietnamese student first trying to speak slowly and carefully and then repeating the same words quickly and with strong intonation. Studying, this exercise took her only about two minutes to practice, but the difference makes her sound as if she had been in America for many years.
V Please listen. You will hear the same words twice. Hello, my name is Muoi. I'm taking American Accent Training. To help you, every word on the CD is also written in the book. By seeing and hearing simultaneously, you'll learn to reconcile the differences between the appearance of English spelling and the sound of English pronunciation and the other aspects of accent. The CD leaves a rather short pause for you to repeat into.
The point of this is to get you responding quickly and without spending too much time thinking about your response. Accent versus Pronunciation Many people equate accent with pronunciation.
I don't feel this to be true at all. America is a big country, and while the pronunciation varies from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the southern to the northern states, two components that are uniquely American stay basically the same—the speech music, or intonation, and the word connections or liaisons.
Throughout this program, we will focus on them. In the latter part of the book we will work on pronunciation concepts, such as Cat? Although America has many regional pronunciation differences, the accent you will learn is that of standard American English as spoken and understood by the majority of educated native speakers in the United States.
Don't worry that you will sound slangy or too casual because you most definitely won't. This is the way a professor lectures to a class, the way a national newscaster broadcasts, the way that is most comfortable and familiar to the majority of native speakers. First, your accent is not bad; it is nonstandard to the American ear.
There is a joke that goes: What do you call a person who can speak three languages? What do you call a person who can speak two languages? What do you call a person who can only speak one language? Every language is equally valid or good, so every accent is good.
George Bernard Shaw said that the English and Americans are two people divided by the same language! Some students learn to overpronounce English because they naturally want to say the word as it is written. Too often an English teacher may allow this, perhaps thinking that colloquial American English is unsophisticated, unrefined, or even incorrect. Not so at all! Just as you don't say the T in listen, the TT in better is pronounced D, bedder. Any other pronunciation will sound foreign, strange, wrong, or different to a native speaker.
More Than It Appears As you will see in Exercise , Squeezed-Out Syllables, on page 18, some words appear to have three or more syllables, but all of them are not actually spoken. Just when you get used to eliminating whole syllables from words, you're going to come across other words that look as if they have only one syllable, but really need to be said with as many as three!
In addition, the inserted syllables are filled with letters that are not in the written word. I'll give you two examples of this strange phenomenon. Pool looks like a nice, one-syllable word, but if you say it this way, at best, it will sound like pull, and at worst will be unintelligible to your listener.
Where did that W come from? It's certainly not written down anywhere, but it is there just as definitely as the P is there. The second example is a word like feel. If you say just the letters that you see, it will sound more like fill. Is that really a Y? These mysterious semivowels are explained under Liaisons in Chapter 2.
They can appear either inside a word as you have seen, or between words as you will learn. Language Is Fluent and Fluid Just like your own language, conversational English has a very smooth, fluid sound. Imagine that you are walking along a dry riverbed with your eyes closed.
Every time you come to a rock, you trip over it, stop, continue, and trip over the next rock. This is how the average foreigner speaks English. It is slow, awkward, and even painful.
Now imagine that you are a great river rushing through that same riverbed—rocks are no problem, are they? You just slide over and around them without ever breaking your smooth flow. It is this feeling that I want you to capture in English. Changing your old speech habits is very similar to changing from a stick shift to an automatic transmission. Yes, you continue to reach for the gearshift for a while and your foot still tries to find the clutch pedal, but this soon phases itself out.
In the same way, you may still say "telephone call" kohl instead of kahl for a while, but this too will soon pass. You will also have to think about your speech more than you do now. In the same way that you were very aware and self-conscious when you first learned to drive, you will eventually relax and deal with the various components simultaneously.
A new accent is an adventure. Be bold! Exaggerate wildly! You may worry that Americans will laugh at you for putting on an accent, but I guarantee you, they won't even notice. They'll just think that you've finally learned to "talk right. There aren't too many characters that are different from the standard alphabet, but just so you'll be familiar with them, look at the chart. It shows eight tense vowels and six lax vowels and semivowels.
Tense Vowels? Since you will be learning how to lengthen vowels when they come before a voiced consonant, it would be confusing to say that hen has a long, short vowel.
It is more descriptive to say that it has a lax vowel that is doubled or lengthened. There are three other tense vowels. It is similar to the noise that a goat or a lamb makes. This is a very common sound, usually written as ow or ou in words like down or round. A tense vowel requires you to use a lot of facial muscles to produce it.
V Now you try it. Repeat after me. In fact, you don't need to move your face at all. You only need to move the back of your tongue and your throat. These sounds are very different from most other languages. It is also the most common sound in English. The semivowels are the American R pronounced er, which is the schwa plus R and the American L which is the schwa plus L.
Vowels will be covered in greater detail in Chapters 3, 8, and A consonant is a sound that causes two points of your mouth to come into contact, in three locations—the lips, the tip of the tongue, and the throat.
A consonant can either be unvoiced whispered or voiced spoken , and it can appear at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. You'll notice that for some categories, a particular sound doesn't exist in English. There is a linguistic distinction between the two, but they are pronounced exactly the same. Since you can't hear the difference between these two sounds, we'll just be using the upside-down e to indicate the schwa sound.
It is pronounced uh. The backwards C []] is more or less pronounced aw. This aw sound has a "back East" sound to it, and as it's not common to the entire United States, it won't be included here. R can be considered a semivowel. One characteristic of a vowel is that nothing in the mouth touches anything else. R definitely falls into that category.
So in the exercises throughout the book it will be treated not so much as a consonant, but as a vowel. Besides voiced and unvoiced, there are two words that come up in pronunciation.
These are sibilant and plosive. When you say the [s] sound, you can feel the air sliding out over the tip of your tongue—this is a sibilant.
When you say the [p] sound, you can feel the air popping out from between your lips—this is a plosive. Be aware that there are two sounds that are sometimes mistakenly taught as sibilants, but are actually plosives: [th] and [v].
For particular points of pronunciation that pertain to your own language, refer to the Nationality Guides on page Throughout this text, we will be using three symbols to indicate three separate actions: V Indicates a command or a suggestion. If you are studying American Accent Training on your own, please contact toll-free or www.
The diagnostic analysis is designed to evaluate your current speech patterns to let you know where your accent is standard and nonstandard. There's a lot to learn, but I hope to make it as enjoyable as possible. I should pick up on the American intonation pattern pretty easily, although the only way to get it is to practice all of the time.
Go upstairs. Betty bought a bit of better butter. My name is Ann. Beddy bada bida bedder budder. It is the end of the bad years. Give it to his owner. Italian Italy 1. Go w upstairs. G' v' to w i zon'r. So, when an American says, "Read my lips! We create most of our sounds in the throat, using our tongue very actively. If you hold your fingers over your lips or clench your jaws when you practice speaking American English, you will find yourself much closer to native-sounding speech than if you try to pronounce every If you can relate American English to music, remember that the indigenous music is jazz.
Listen to their speech music, and you will hear that Americans have a melodic, jazzy way of producing sounds. Imagine the sound of a cello when you say, Beddy bada bida beader budder Betty bought a bit of better butter and you'll be close to the native way of saying it. Because most Americans came from somewhere else, American English reflects the accent contributions of many lands. The speech music has become much more exaggerated than British English, developing a strong and distinctive intonation.
If you use this intonation, not only will you be easier to understand, but you will sound much more confident, dynamic, and persuasive.
Intonation, or speech music, is the sound that you hear when a conversation is too far away to be clearly audible but close enough for you to tell the nationality of the speakers. The American intonation dictates liaisons and pronunciation, and it indicates mood and meaning. Without intonation, your speech would be flat, mechanical, and very confusing for your listener. What is the American intonation pattern? How is it different from other languages? Foa egzampuru, eefu you hea ah Jahpahneezu pahsohn speakingu Ingurishu, the sound would be very choppy, mechanical, and unemotional to an American.
Za sem vey vis Cheuman pipples, it sounds too stiff. A mahn frohm Paree ohn zee ahzer ahnd, eez intonashon goes up at zee end ov evree sentence, and has such a strong intonation that he sounds romantic and highly emotional, but this may not be appropriate for a lecture or a business meeting in English. If you speak word by word, as many people who learned "printed" English do, you'll end up sounding mechanical and foreign.
You may have noticed the same thing happens in your own language: When someone reads a speech, even a native speaker, it sounds stiff and stilted, quite different from a normal conversational tone. This is where you're going to start doing something completely different than what you have done in your previous English studies.
This part is the most difficult for many people because it goes against everything they've been taught. Instead of thinking of each word as a unit, think of sound units. These sound units may or may not correspond to a word written on a page. Sound units make a sentence flow smoothly, like peanut butter— never really ending and never really starting, just flowing along. Even chunky peanut butter is acceptable. So long as you don't try to put plain peanuts directly onto your bread, you'll be OK.
Let those sound groups floating on the wavy river in the figure flow downhill and you'll get the staircase. Staircase intonation not only gives you that American sound, it also makes you sound much more confident. Not every American uses the downward staircase. A certain segment of the population uses rising staircases—generally, teenagers on their way to a shopping mall: "Hi, my name is Tiffany. I live in La Canada. I'm on the pep squad.
In saying your words, imagine that they come out as if they were bounding lightly down a flight of stairs. Every so often, one jumps up to another level, and then starts down again. Americans tend to stretch out their sounds longer than you may think is natural. So to lengthen your vowel sounds, put them on two stairsteps instead of just one. We're here. For example, in Japanese or Spanish, the word no is, to our ear, clipped or abbreviated. When a word ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant—one that you "say" b, d, g, z, v, zh, j , the preceding vowel is said more slowly, and on a double stairstep.
When applied to a person or to language, they take on the meaning of upset or rude. For example, in the expressions "His curt reply Three Ways to Make Intonation About this time, you're coming to the point where you may be wondering, what exactly are the mechanics of intonation? What changes when you go to the top of the staircase or when you put stress on a word? There are three ways to stress a word. This is not a very sophisticated way of doing it, but it will definitely command attention.
Although pausing just before changing the pitch is effective, you don't want to do it every time, because then it becomes an obvious technique. However, it will make your audience stop and listen because they think you're going to say something interesting. Every time you want to stress a word by changing pitch, pull on the rubber band. Stretch it out gently, don' t jerk it sharply. Use the rubber band and stretch it out every time you change pitch.
Read first across, then down. ABC 2. Dogs eat bones. They eat bones. They eat them. Give me one. What do Americans do? We go up and down staircases. We start high and end low. That sounds simple enough, but when and where do you start a new staircase? Statement Intonation with Nouns Intonation or pitch change is primarily used to introduce new information. This means that when you are making a statement for the first time, you will stress the nouns.
Add your own examples. Jerry makes music. Mike likes bikes. Jean sells some apples. Elsa wants a book. Carol paints the car. Adam plays pool. Bill and I fix the bikes. Bobby needs some money.
Ann and Ed call the kids. Susie combs her hair. The kids like the candy. John lives in France. The girls have a choice.
Nelly teaches French. The boys need some help. Ben writes articles. Keys open locks. V Practice the patterns five more times on your own, using your rubber band. In a nutshell, these are the two basic intonation patterns: Dogs bones. In the second column, stress the verb. Fill in your own examples at the bottom. Bob sees Betty. He sees her. Betty knows Bob. She knows him. They call them. Jan sells some apples. She sells some. Jean sells cars.
She sells them. We fix them. Carl hears Bob and me. He hears us. They have one. They like it. They need something. Ellen should call her sister. She should call someone. The murderer killed the plumber. He killed a man. The tourists went shopping. They bought stuff. They do, but usually a question will step upward until the very end, where it takes one quick little downward step. A question rises a little higher than a statement with the same intonation pattern.
As your feelings rise in an emotional situation, your intonation rises up along with them. Is it gone? Check Answer Key, beginning on page Sam sees Bill.
He sees him. She wants one. Mary wants a car. Betty likes English. She likes it. They play with them. They eat some. Children play with toys. Len and Joe eat some pizza. Bob and I call you and Bill. We call you. You and Bill read the news. You read it. It tells one. The news tells a story. Bernard works in a restaurant. Mark lived in France. He works in one. He lived there. New Information It sounds like rain.
Rain is the new information. It's the most important word in that sentence and you could replace everything else with duh-duh-duh. Duh-duh-duh rain will still let you get your point across. V Repeat: Duh-duh-duh rain I It sounds like rain. Opinion It sounds like rain, but I don't think it is. It smells like Chanel, but at that price, it's a knock-off.
It feels like It tastes like These examples all give the impression that you mean the opposite of what your senses tell you. V Practice the intonation difference between new information and opinion: It sounds like rain. It's rain. It sounds like rain, but it's not. Contrast He likes rain, but he hates snow. Like and hate are contrasted and are the stronger words in the sentence.
Can't It can't rain when there're no clouds. Contractions shouldn't, wouldn't and negatives no, not, never are important words since they totally negate the meaning of a sentence, but they are not usually stressed. Can't is the exception. Pay close attention to the changes in pitch that you must make to convey the different meanings intended. The words to be stressed are indicated in bold face.
It sounds like rain. He likes rain, but he hates snow. It can't rain on my parade! He can't do it. See also Ex. You will be given only a short time in which to reply so that you won't have the leisure to overthink.
Start speaking as soon as you hear the tone because I'll be saying the sentence only a few seconds later. Convey the information that it really does sound as if rain is falling. Convey the opinion that although it has the sound of rain, it may be something else. Convey the different feelings that someone has about rain and snow.
Convey the fact that rain is an impossibility right now. V Practice the four sentences on your own ten times. Exercise Meaning of "Pretty" CD 1 Track 15 Native speakers make a clear distinction between pretty easily easily and pretty easily a little difficult. Repeat the answers after me paying close attention to your stress. Question: How did you like the movie? Answer: 1. It was pretty good. She liked it. She didn't like it much.
I didn't say he stole the money. Someone else said it. That's not true at all. I only suggested the possibility. I think someone else took it. Maybe he just borrowed it. I didn't say he stole the money, but rather some other money. He may have taken some jewelry.
I I didn't say he stole the money. It's true that somebody said it, but I wasn't that person. Didn't I didn't say he stole the money. Someone has accused me and I'm protesting my innocence. Say I didn't say he stole the money. Maybe I hinted it. Maybe I wrote it. In some way, I indicated that he stole the money, but I didn't say it. He I didn't say he stole the money. I think someone stole the money, only not the person you suspect did it.
Stole I didn't say he stole the money. I agree that he took it, but I think his motive was different. The I didn't say he stole the money, but rather some other money. We agree that he stole some money, but I don't think it's this money. Money I didn't say he stole the money. We agree that he's a thief, but we think he stole different things.
Notice that in the first half of these sentences nothing changes but the intonation. V Repeat after me. I'll tell you which meaning to express. To test your ear, I'm going to repeat the sentences in random order. Try to determine which word I'm stressing. The answers are given in parentheses, but don't look unless you really have to.
Here we go. Indicate that he borrowed the money and didn't steal it. Indicate that you are denying having said that he stole it. Indicate that you think he stole something besides money.
Indicate that you were not the person to say it. Indicate that you don't think that he was the person who stole it. Indicate that you didn't say it outright, but did suggest it in some way. In this chapter, the selected scenes of the two American movies chosen for this bachelor's thesis, Night at the Museum 3 and Dalmatians , will be analysed in regard to how the characters played by non-British actors, use certain stereotypes in order to portray "the Britishness" Hakala The emphasis of the analysis will be on what are some of the used stereotypes of pronunciation, as well as on whether the characters are presented in a certain light comical or negative, for example by their choice of words.
We will be using DA and descriptive qualitative method to support the analysis of the data. The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English TrinE at the level of speech production The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English TrinE at the level of speech production and contribute to what is popularly described as 'sing-song' prosody.
Based on read and spontaneous data from speakers, we analyze pitch level, range, and dynamism in TrinE in comparison to Southern Standard British BrE and Educated Indian English IndE and investigate sociophonetic variation in TrinE prosody with a view to these global F0 parameters.
Our findings suggest that a large pitch range could potentially be considered an endonormative feature of TrinE that distinguishes it from other varieties BrE and IndE , at least in spontaneous speech.
More importantly, however, it is shown that a high degree of pitch variation in terms of range and dynamism is not as much characteristic of TrinE as a whole as it is of female Trinidadian speakers.
An important finding of this study is that pitch variation patterns are not homogenous in TrinE, but systematically sociolinguistically conditioned across gender, age, and ethnic groups, and rural and urban speakers. The findings thus reveal that there is a considerable degree of systematic local differentiation in TrinE prosody. On a more general level, the findings may be taken to indicate that endonormative tendencies and sociolinguistic differentiation in TrinE prosody are interlinked.
Robert Fuchs. As students of speech, we tend to think of the sound units of language as discrete and independent. We notice sound units have features in common. Often, those features are in parallel, and there are useful generalizations we can make Often, those features are in parallel, and there are useful generalizations we can make. But we have not made the leap to the insight that features, by coming together to create the sound units, define them. It is not the features themselves that are fundamental, but the way that they operate in parallel.
Sound sets break down to a pattern of binary contrasts, based on speech gestures and tempered by acoustic results. This paradigm shift amounts to a breakthrough that simplifies and leverages pedagogy, comparative analysis, and the study of accent. The aim of this publication is to provide an insight into the current pronunciation teaching practices in a global context.
On the basis of the findings, it provides the views and practices of university teachers of phonetics and On the basis of the findings, it provides the views and practices of university teachers of phonetics and phonology, as well as the opinion of Slovak learners of English on the importance of pronunciation, preference of native accents and accent goals, as well as the most preferred techniques to improve their pronunciation in formal school settings and informal situations.
Reviewers are the largely invisible backbone of a successful journal, giving of their time to help improve the work of other scholars. This paper talks about the role of reviewers, the ways that they help authors, the importance of This paper talks about the role of reviewers, the ways that they help authors, the importance of addressing reviewer comments in the revision process, and the process of publishing. It also provides a call for new reviewers as the field continues to grow, and it provides the criteria used for reviews in JSLP.
Mis understanding your native language: Regional accent impedes processing of information status. However, this process is impeded in second-language listeners, as However, this process is impeded in second-language listeners, as well as when the speaker has an unfamiliar accent.
In Experiment 1, 42 native speakers of Canadian English followed instructions spoken in British English to move objects on a screen while their eye movements were tracked. Native listeners use prosodic cues to information status to disambiguate between two possible referents, a new and a previously mentioned one, before they have heard the complete word.
By contrast, the Canadian participants, similarly to second-language speakers, were not able to make full use of prosodic cues in the way native British listeners do. In Experiment 2, 19 native speakers of Canadian English rated the British English instructions used in Experiment 1, as well as the same instructions spoken by a Canadian imitating the British English prosody. While information status had no effect for the Canadian imitations, the original stimuli received higher ratings when prosodic realization and information status of the referent matched than for mismatches, suggesting a native-like competence in these offline ratings.
Ivy Mok. English language, literature and culture. This study employed the interaction hypothesis Long, to investigate attitudes towards different English accents i. It explored the reasons for It explored the reasons for such views, as well as identifying the accent the participants found most effective for communication.
Each student talked for 15 minutes with an American and British interlocutor, enabling the researcher to recognize the common topics appearing within these conversations. Data were collected using a mixed-method approach, employing a web-based survey of closed and open-ended questions, alongside the recorded conversations. The key findings reveal that students enjoyed the SCMC conversation and also found it beneficial for improving their speaking skills. Furthermore, SCMC allowed students to choose the topic and negotiate meaning with native speakers during a lengthy conversation.
This study establishes that students preferred American to British accents and felt more confident in understanding American speakers. The study concludes by highlighting the practical implications for teaching speaking skills, also suggesting new directions for future research.
Learners' views of non native speaker status, accent, and identity: an English as an international language perspective. The study examines perceptions of nonnative speakers NNSs of English toward accented speech and its relation with identity from the perspective of English as an international language EIL. The data were collected from 51 Iranian EFL Regardless of what the standard accent is perceived to be in any particular locale, discussion of deviations from it also However, though many regional or non- standard British English accents do drop initial [h], not all do so.
Author : T. For example, it is indefensible to make a pupil feel at any time and in any way Bian reports that some participants would feel embarrassed for not having a standard native English accent , What perceptions would you have about someone who used RP?
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