[MUSIC] Welcome to the module improving your pronunciation. In this, and the next five lessons, we're going to look at techniques you can use to most improve your ability to be understood in English. These are strategies that give you the biggest bang for the buck. Now, before we go on, let's talk about the question of accents. Everyone has an accent. I have an accent. You'll have an accent. Everyone you speak to has an accent. So, it's not a question of eliminating whatever accent you speak with. It's a question of adopting the techniques, the strategies that English speakers use to sound more English like. So here you see, we talk about varieties of English. These are two of the main varieties of English. British English and American English. We have BE and AE. Of course, there are other varieties of English, New Zealand English, Australian English. And then within every variety, we talk about individual dialects. You can see that in British English, there are 16 major dialects. In American English, there's generally recognized three major dialects. But within each variety there are standards, standards of pronunciation. So in British English the standard is what's called RP, Received Pronunciation. In American English the standard is what's called GA, General American. That's normally the language, the pronunciation, that you'll hear from national broadcasters. So what I'm speaking with today is General American. So, of course, that's the accent that I'm familiar with and that's the accent that I'll be talking about. Now, what is the difference between different accents? Typically the principal difference is in the handling of vowel sounds. And we'll talk a little about this later on. But there are many, many more commonalities than there are differences. But what we'll be talking about, stress, intonation, melody, rhythm, these are nearly universal in every variety of English. So what you'll be learning in these lessons are applicable to any variety of English that you speak. I will leave the lessons to do with vowel sounds and consonant sounds. These are online lessons that you can work at on your own. So before we get started with individual insights into the language, I would like you to take maybe five minutes to fill out the reflection survey that's attached to, that will follow in this video. And it gives you an idea, gives you an opportunity to think about your pronunciation, think about where you want to go with your pronunciation, and think about how much effort you want to invest. Into improving your pronunciation. All right, welcome back. So we're going to look at the overview of the English pronunciation system. English consists and educated English consists of three main components. We have the sounds of English. These are the consonants and vowels. We have the rhythm of English, okay. This is the alternation between long and short. Applies both in words and phrases. We have stress and we have absence of stress, and stress and the absence of stress, affect the quality of the vowel. Every word has a syllable that receives main stress. We'll talk about that in much more detail later on in this module. But that's an important element of a word's pronunciation. You have the learn the syllable that receives the main stress. That's part of learning to pronounce a word. In addition to sounds and rhythm, every language has a melody. English has it's own melody. And the melody of English is a very important component, the mastering a reasonable pronunciation system, you can see here, that when we talk about melody, we're talking about pitch jumps. We're talking about rise and fall. So if you listen to what my voice did there, pitch jump, and then step down. We'll look in the next lesson at this jump up and step down intonation, which is a characteristic of English pronunciation. Let's look at what we mean by sounds. Now by sounds we mean consonants, and I've written here is C, is a consonant sound and vowel, so V for the vowel sound. What you see in this word congratulations, you happen to see the individual sounds indicated. You have the co a in ga ra tulations and one very important point to notice is that, the sounds and the letters do not correspond one to one. So you see here, we have that t i makes one consonant sound, makes the sh sound. Congratulations. The stress in a syllable is carried by the vowels. The vowels and as I said, the vowel sounds are what differs from British English, Australian English, and so on. Consonant sounds are pretty much universal. And important element to recognize is that English has patterns of stress and unstress. So what we'd done here, this little upside down U that indicates an unstressed syllable. The in this direction is a secondary stress and this direction is a primary stress. So if you listen to the way I pronounce this word, congratulations. Congratulations. The r here means the vowel is reduced. Reduced vowels, all pretty much have the same sound. The f here indicates the vowel is full. Only full vowels get their full pronunciation. This dot here, which you'll see in later slides as well. That indicates the syllable that receives main stress. Now remember, as I said, every word has one syllable that receives main stress. Longer words may have an additional syllable that receives secondary stress. So here, this syllable is receiving secondary stress. This syllable is receiving primary stress. Congratulations, congratulations. Now, rhythm which is this alternation of stress and unstress is also a characteristic of English phrases. So in this notation system, the open circle represents a full syllable, the small dots are reduced syllables, and the large dots, carry the main stress. So a normal pronunciation of this phrase right here, you seem to be amazed at our team. And if you listen to that rhythm, you seem to be amazed at our team, you seem to be amazed at our team, that is what we mean by rhythm, this bop, bop, bop. Now, some languages will take a beat on every syllable. In English, we have a beat, beats occur where the stresses occur. You seem to be amazed to our team. It's hard to believe we could win. Now, one of the activities which is described in our practice sheet attached to this lesson is, what we call walking and talking. Walking and talking, we walk out the stress of a prey, so you seem to be amazed at our team. It's hard to believe we could win. This is a practice activity, simple as it is, walking and talking. It's a practice activity that you can use to adjust your speech rhythm to the English speech rhythm. And you have plenty more of these practice activities, attached to this lesson. Now melody, which is the up and down, the pitch of the language, is also a component of the sound system. It's combined with rhythm, just as in a piece of music, you have rhythm and you have melody. So here they wont they game, hear that step up? They won the game? Now additional surprise might be, they won the game? An even higher step up. What was the score? Now what you see here is a jump up and step down, we'll look at that in more detail in the next lesson, they won the score. So not score, they won the score. Step up. Jump up and step down. The focal stress and phrase melody, they work together. You will need to practice them individually. And then as you become more proficient using rhythm and intonation, you'll blend them together. But for example, I'm going to Boston. So, I come up here, I'm going to Boston. I'm leaving tomorrow. Please open the window. When are you going? Who will you be visiting? You hear that pitch up and pitch down. [MUSIC] Now, this is a very important point here, and depending on your native language, you will have different degrees of difficulty mastering this principle. But many, many languages use a narrow pitch range, and a fairly even timing on syllables. So here we have the timing of syllables. Here we have the pitch range. So this, hello my name is Juan. Hello, my name is Juan. Very even syllables, very narrow pitch range. Now English is not like that at all. English is all the way on the other end of the scale. English uses a wide pitch range, just hear what I did. A wide pitch range. And the length of the syllables depends on the stress. So unstressed syllables are shortened. Stressed syllables are lengthened. So this same statement with the regular English accent. Hello. My name is Juan. Hello, my name is Juan. Hello, my name is Juan. So you hear that Juan, you heard hello, you heard my, name, is, Juan. So this pattern right here, if you can, depending on what your native language is, you maybe closer to this pattern. Moving from this pattern, to this pattern, will do more than anything else to improve your ability to be understood in English. Intonation and stress are the keys that you can work on, what we talked about earlier, the biggest bang for your buck. So these are the four principles that I want you to think about going forward. Rhythm and intonation, rhythm and intonation are easier to master, easier to train than tweaking your vowels or tweaking your consonants. They take much longer to develop. Now this is a very important element and we'll talk about this especially in the next module. Improvement happens gradually, and it happens by what you do. Speaking is a physical activity. You use the muscles in your mouth, you use your lips, you use your tongue. If you do not train those muscles in an English fashion, your pronunciation isn't going to change. And just like training muscles in the gym or training muscles for playing soccer or whatever it may be, you need to train your speaking muscles to improve your pronunciation. That happens through what you will do. This is a fact that we have to live with in learning any foreign language, any non-native language, is that improvement takes place gradually. And it takes place primarily, especially pronunciation, what we will do we call covert rehearsal and inself talk. We'll talk about that much more in the next module. [MUSIC]
