If you’ve been enjoying shadowing to develop your control of stress and rhythm in English, I’ve create a few additional short audios and transcripts you could use to practise with. You could focus on just the main stress of each audio, or also analyse content and function words. It’s up to you! British people: cold […]
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Shadowing: main stress
We’ve already looked at shadowing for content words and for function words. Today, let’s look at how to shadow to mimic the main stress in English. It’s quite simple. Step 1. Find an audio with a transcript Just like shadowing for content and function words, it helps if you can find an audio with a […]
Shadowing practice: function words
In the last blog post, we looked at what shadowing is, and how to use it to improve our ability to identify and produce the stressed syllables of content words. If you haven’t practised with that post, please do so here before continuing. In this post, we will extend what we did last time to […]
Shadowing practice: content words
Shadowing is a great way to improve pronunciation skills, especially for working on rhythm and intonation. In this post, we look at what shadowing is, and how to use it to improve our control of sentence stress. We will focus on using stressing content words whilst shadowing. What is shadowing? Shadowing is a technique in […]
Homework suggestions
Lots of students ask me what they can do to practise English at home. My best suggestion is read and listen to English as much you can, with materials you are interested in! That could be books, articles, films, series, Youtube videos, or podcasts. The more you are exposed to English, the more you will […]
Function words in English
When speaking English, we need to destress function words. Function words are little grammatical words that don’t give us the key meaning of the sentence. We destress these words by using their weak forms, which often contain a schwa sound (/ə/). A schwa sound is a very weak vowel sound that we make with a […]
Vocabulary learning tips
To listen to this article, click the button below. Learning vocabulary is a big part of learning a language. However, it can certainly be challenging! To truly learn a word, we need to know lots of different things: how it’s spelt and pronounced, what it means, and how it is used with other words. So, […]
5 language learning tips
If you’ve ever tried to learn a language, you will know that it can be a challenging task! It requires patience, consistency, and lots of practice. So, how can we make this process a little easier? Here are 5 language learning tips to help set you up for success. 1. Find a way to enjoy […]