Teaching American English Pronunciation

Overview

When you hear Americans pronounce words you'll notice that they always stress one syllable in each word more that the others. We call this syllable stress. The vowels in stressed syllables sound louder, longer and clearer that the vowels in other syllables. The vowel sound in a stressed syllable has a slightly higher pitch. This is VERY, VERY important!

Syllable stress is important in spoken American English because it helps to create the rhythm of the language.

Three Syllable Stress Patterns

Below are three patterns to help you remember which syllables to stress. Read each pattern. Then pronounce the example words and sentences in each section.

1. Stress is usually placed on the syllable that contains the root or base word. Here are some examples

unPAID- The rent was unpaid for three months.
inCLUDE- Please include your name and address.
preDICT-Thomas predicts it will be sunny tomorrow.
unABLE- I'm unable to help you today.
reMIND- Will you remind me to call home after class?
prePARE- Richard said he would prepare dinner tonight.

The vowel sounds in the unstressed syllables are often reduced to a schwa vowel sound.

2. Word prefixes are usually NOT stressed. Here are some examples:

SLOWly-Christina walks very slowly.
FASTer- John walks faster than I do.
SPEAKing- Jean likes speaking in class.
CAREful- Please be careful walking home at night.
SMALLest- Lucy is the smallest person in the class.
DRINKable -The water in the bathroom is undrinkable!

3. Most two-syllable nouns (90%) are stressed on the first syllable. Here are some examples:

MARket-Sally buys bananas at the market.
TEAcher-Mr. Williams is my computer teacher.
FRIday -We're going to the movies on Friday.
PAper- I need to buy paper for the printer.
KITchen -The kitchen is a mess!
BROther Robert's brother is very kind.

These are just some of the rules and patterns that you can teach your students about syllable stress in words. To learn more rules and get activities for teaching syllable stress check out the books for teaching pronunciation books by Avery & Ehrlich and Celce-Murcia above

Since English is not a phonetic language there is not always a one-on-one relationship between the letters in the English alphabet and spoken sounds. This can cause problems for your students when they are trying to pronounce English from text.

The 26 letters in the English (Roman) alphabet make many different sounds in spoken American English. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, American English has 25 consonant sounds and up to 18 vowel sounds (the exact number of sounds may vary from region to region).

Let's look at some sound-spelling situations that are frequently confusing to students who are learning to speak English. We'll start with the letter "s".

When you are speaking English the letter "s" can represent several different sounds depending on its location in a word.

In the word same the "s" sounds like /s/.
In the word leisure the "s" sounds like /zh/.
In the word design the "s" sounds like /z/.

The fact that "s" has three sounds can be very confusing when students are learning to speak English from a written text!

Let's look at some English words that begin with the consonant "c".
city
century
cat
cut
cot

The letter "c" in the words city and century sound like /s/. The letter "c" in the words cat and cut and cot sound like /k/.

Look carefully at the spelling of the five words above. Can you figure out the rule or pattern used to determine the spoken sound of the letter "c"?

The rule is that 'c' sounds like /s/ when it falls before the vowels "i" and "e". It sounds like the /k/ when it falls before the vowels "a", "o" and "u".

You can see from the examples above that the position of a consonant within a word can change the way it sounds. This happens frequently in American English pronunciation.

One excellent resource for learning about American English sounds is Charles Becker's Best Accent Training. You can check Charles' program out in the module below. I use Best Accent Training myself and I love it!

American spoken English has 3 sounds for the past tense ed . These are the /t/ sound for ed after voiceless consonants, the /d/ sound after voiced consonants and the /id/ or schwa + /d/ sound after sibilant sounds such as /s/ & /z/.

Eva Easton has a nice page on her website that you can use to learn the rules and practice the 3 sounds of ed. Don't forget to take the quiz at the end!

American English ED SOUNDS

A great book you can use to teach these sounds to your students is MASTERING the AMERICAN ACCENT.

Michigan State University's Center for Language Education & Research offers free resources for language teaching. Resources include software, lessons and a PDF newsletter. The Fall 2010 newsletter is about teaching pronunciation.

There are many great tools and resources here so be sure to take a look. The Fall 2010 Newsletter is about teaching pronunciation.
Free PDF file on Teaching Pronunciation.

Maybe you are not sure how to teach American English sounds and patterns. Most teachers did not learn how to do this well during their training.

One way that I learned to teach key sounds such as the schwa and the voiced th was using Charles Becker's Best Accent Training Course.

The course is meant for language learners but I use it to learn articulation methods and practice activities that I can use in my pronunciation classes. Learning from Charles saves me time and helps me be a better teacher.

Each sound lesson comes with a printable transcript. There is also a language guide chart that tells you the most problematic vowel and consonant sounds for each native language group. This is a great resource to have!

You can see it here: Best Accent Training.