Improve Your Pronunciation

Pronunciation is a vitally important aspect of learning any language. However good your grammar and vocabulary is, if you can't pronounce words and sentences well, then people will struggle to understand you. One aspect of pronunciation that people often forget is 'intonation'. Intonation refers to the rise and fall in pitch of the voice.

Today's activity uses a site with some interactive activities from CUP to help you improve your intonation.

Task:

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/4d59se click on 'intonation'. You can then listen to some short conversations. The conversations are animated so they show you where the intonation goes up or down.
Listen to them and then try to copy them. Pay careful attention to the intonation. You can get more practice at developing your intonation using clips from movies. Find a clip of a movie you like and try to copy the rises and falls in intonation of the speaker. You can find lots of film clips on YouTube.

You can also try some of the other activities on the site that deal with word stress and sentence stress and learning the phonemic alphabet.

Hope you enjoy these exercises and try some more EFL ESL activities tomorrow.

• Try some more pronunciation activities.

Related links for teachers:

• Dictation goes Web 2.0
• Pronunciation goes 2.0
• Phonology can be fun and free
• Karaoke with a Social Network
• Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL
• Listen and Write the News
• Listen to and Download Texts

Best

Nik Peachey