This post is to provide some extra exercises for students who have taken the class on the ‘glottal t’. What is the glottal ‘t’? If you’ve taken the glottal ‘t’ class, you will remember that the glottal stop is a common feature of Standard Southern British English. It is one possible pronunciation of the phoneme […]
As we studied in class, changes in pitch and lengthening of syllables are often particularly exaggerated when we want to express strong emotions in English, especially in British English. If we don’t make these changes with our voice, our intonation may sound too ‘flat’ and we may sound uninterested or bored. Mini shadowing exercise Practise […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]