essay to improve pronunciation

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How can I improve my English pronunciation?

Try these simple and effective activities to improve your pronunciation.

Pronunciation is really important for communication and making sure people understand your message. 

Pronunciation is also helpful for your listening skills. When you know what words sound like in a sentence, you'll understand much more of what you hear.

So, how can you improve your pronunciation? Here are some ideas.

1. Listen and write

Take a short clip from a song, film, show or audio file. Write down the words that you hear and replay it until you have got them all. Play it at 0.75x or 0.5x speed if you need to.

Then compare your version with the lyrics, transcript or subtitles. Did you get it exactly? Note any differences. This really helps you to focus on particular pronunciation features.

Finally, say the words yourself, copying the same sounds that you heard. Repeat the practice until you can pronounce the sounds smoothly and comfortably.

2. Speak and check

This is the reverse of the previous tip. Now, you say the words and let a dictation app or website write down what you say.

If it writes down what you said correctly, you must have pronounced it well! But if it doesn't, check those misunderstood words because you might not have pronounced them clearly. (Note, however, that dictation programs do sometimes make mistakes.)

For this tip, you'll need a dictation app or website. Many phones have voice dictation functions. You can also use websites such as https://dictation.io/ (make sure you set the language to English).

3. Record yourself

Prepare a few sentences and record yourself saying them, using your phone. Then listen to the recording. Are you satisfied with your pronunciation? Were any sounds unclear? Was it too fast or slow? 

You can also try saying the sentences that you listened to for tip 1 and compare your recording with the original.

Many people dislike listening to their own voice! But if you can get past this reaction, it's a good way to identify things to improve in your pronunciation.

4. Learn pronunciation symbols

Did you know that English has 26 letters but over 40 different sounds?

We use special symbols to show pronunciation. For example, the word enough is /ɪ'nʌf/. This helps us see that the first sound of enough is actually an /ɪ/ sound, not an /e/ sound, even it's spelled with 'e'.

It's worth learning these symbols because then you can identify individual sounds more precisely. Learning the symbols takes a little work, but it's not too hard – in fact, many are obvious. You can probably guess what sounds /n/ and /f/ represent!

Most dictionaries use these symbols. You can also see and hear all of the symbols in the Sounds Right app .

5. Focus on confusing sounds

We suggest focusing on sounds that can cause confusion for listeners if they are pronounced incorrectly. Here are some examples.

• Long and short vowels, e.g. I want to l ea ve here (long /i:/ sound) vs  I want to l i ve here (short /ɪ/ sound)
• /r/ and /l/, e.g. Can you co rr ect the file? vs  Can you co ll ect the file?
• Consonant clusters, e.g. clo thes – some people say it like close or closes .

When you practise English, make a note of any confusions like these and practise pronouncing them clearly.

Now you've read our advice on improving your pronunciation, go and try out some of the ideas. Good luck!

Which of the tips have you tried? Did they help you to improve your pronunciation?

Language level

I'm always evaluated as upper intermediate B2, I feel so frustrated about this. I have been using English for 5 years as my communication language. I'm doing a PhD degree in pharmacy and still unconfident about my English :(. I knew that my pronunciation is the worst part of my story ( as I learned English only by reading and writing , no listening) and only living abroad made me realize how bad my pronunciation is. But now I'm not satisfied even with my level test :(

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Hello asrdavid,

That sounds really hard and I'm sorry to hear you are so frustrated. Without knowing you better, I can't say anything about your level, but I can say that it's quite normal for people to 'plateau' at certain levels. This simply means that continuing to improve takes more, or perhaps a different kind of, effort.

The step from B2 to C1 is a significant one. Again, it's hard for me to give you specific advice without knowing you, but one thing I always recommend my students do is read. It sounds as if you may do a fair amount of that already, but if not, I'd encourage you to try it. Try reading things that are different from what you normally read. If you read novels, they don't have to be classics of English literature -- choose books that you think you would enjoy. You could even get the English version of a book you've already enjoyed reading in your native language. In that way, you can pay more attention to the language as you revisit a story you like.

With pronunciation, the amount of work to do can feel overwhelming. I'd suggest choosing two or three very specific aspects of pronunciation to improve -- for example, the pronunciation of the '-ed' ending, or the intonation of questions -- and working on them until you've made some good progress. Ignore other aspects of pronunciation until those feel natural -- or at least more natural -- than before. Often people need to exercise their mouths quite a lot to make the sounds; this is normal and not necessarily a sign of a problem. Once you've improved in these two of three aspects you identified and are producing the sounds with much less effort, move on to a new set of two or three. Progress is slow in the beginning, but often people find that it increases much more quickly after a short time.

And of course always feel free to ask us about things here. We're happy to help as best we can.

Best wishes, Kirk LearnEnglish team

"You can improve your listening, and then your speaking will immediately improve. You cannot speak well unless you listen more and more, record for yourself, and compare it. So, I advise you to learn vowel and consonant sounds, then download the ELSA Speak app, which will help you realize if there is any mistake in your pronunciation. Finally, be proud to be an upper intermediate. I am an English teacher, but during my studies, I wasn't interested in improving my English. But now, I'll try and try. The more you fail and try, the more you succeed. By the way, my level is intermediate, so don't be frustrated. To reach an advanced level, it takes more time and effort, so don't hurry."

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6 tips for improving your English pronunciation

By cath mclellan, 06 nov 2019 - 10:28.

Any English language learner knows that often spelling isn’t very helpful if we want to know how to correctly say a word. Take a look at this sentence, focusing on the words in bold - do you know how to pronounce them?

"The man didn't feel very comfortable in his grey suit . He didn't enjoy wearing smart clothes , and when he wore them he felt a subtle difference in his personality.''

English spelling hasn't evolved much over time, but how we pronounce words has. This makes pronunciation a real challenge for language learners.  But good pronunciation is not just 'how words and letters sound'; there are other equally important features to consider, like intonation (how the tone of voice changes during a sentence, going up or down), stress (which words and syllables have more 'weight' when we are speaking), and connected speech - how words can sound different when they are joined together in natural speech. All of these features contribute to good pronunciation - but don't confuse them with accent. 

In the UK, the USA and other English speaking countries there are many, many different types of accents, but people with those different accents can all be considered to have correct pronunciation.  When you are learning English you don't have to sound British or American. Good pronunciation means being understood; not necessarily sounding like you were born in New York or London. In fact, many native speakers love hearing English spoken with a Spanish, Italian or French accent!  So, how can you work on your pronunciation so that people from all over the world can understand you easily, even if you retain your native accent? Here are six top tips for you to practice and perfect your pronunciation.

1 - Listen!   Listening to examples of authentic speech is the most obvious way to improve your own pronunciation. There are lots of ways to do this - watch a film in its original version, listen to podcasts about a topic that interests you in English (you could try the British Council English podcasts app here ), even listening to music can help. Try to notice the intonation that people use.  You can add to this by 'shadowing'. Shadowing means listening to a short sentence or phrase, and then repeating it afterwards, trying to imitate the sounds, intonation and word stress and noticing how your mouth and tongue move when you speak.

2.  Record yourself. Once you have practiced shadowing, you could record yourself speaking - either repeating a short phrase that you have listened to, or doing a longer speaking task from a coursebook, like describing a picture. Listen back and make a note of any sounds that you have problems with - practice these words / sounds slowly and then record yourself again. Can you notice an improvement?

3. Get to know the phonemic chart. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a visual representation of different sounds. It might look strange and it might feel like you are learning a whole new language, but it can really help you with pronunciation. All dictionaries have a phonetic transcription of words so that you know how to pronounce them. This is really helpful with English because as we have already seen, English spelling doesn't always correspond with its pronunciation. Think about the letters 'ough' in the words 'though', 'through', 'tough', 'ought'. It would be impossible to guess how to say those words without some help. 

Take a look at the British Council's phonemic chart (see link above) or download the Sounds Right app . You can click on the different phonemes and listen to how they sound. This can help you to hear differences between similar sounds.

4. Use a dictionary. As well as printed dictionaries which will give you a phonetic transcription of a word, there are lots of online dictionaries where you can click and listen to the word being spoken. A particularly good one is howjsay - even the name of this website is a useful guide as to how to pronounce the common question 'How do you say...?' in a natural way.  It's a great resource for checking how new words sound.

5. Do some exercise! Different languages have different sounds, and our mouths adapt to those sounds.  Some sounds are physically very difficult for us to make, as they don't exist in our native language.  Just like when you are learning a new sport or dance move, it's important that you train your mouth to know how to form new sounds - the more you practice the easier it gets. For example, lots of Spanish speakers have problems with the difference between the /b/ and /v/ sound.  We make the /b/ sound by joining our lips together and then letting go. The /v/ sound is similar but your top teeth should touch your bottom lip before you let go.  The more you practice this, the easier it gets - try saying  " I'd like a very big beverage please''! The Sounds of English section on the BBC's Learning English site has a good selection of video tutorials which explain how to make different sounds and activities to practice them. 

6. Get to know your minimal pairs. Minimal pairs are words that have almost the exact same pronunciation, but with one sound that is different - for example, ship and sheep. The difference between the /I/ in 'ship' and the /i:/ in 'sheep' is the length of the vowel. This can be difficult to hear for many language learners, and comes up in lots of different words.  The first step is to be able to tell the difference between the sounds when you hear them, them. You can listen to some common minimal pairs here - can you hear the difference? Can you make the different sounds yourself?

Finally, don't feel bad if you still make mistakes with pronunciation - English is famously tricky. As far back as 1922, a Dutch language learner wrote a very long poem about the problems of English pronunciation called ' The Chaos '' - it may be chaotic, but with practice it can definitely get better!

How To Improve Your English Pronunciation

Pronunciation is, for many English learners, the hardest skill to get right. If that’s your case, it may be because you learned English filling out grammar exercises, reading, or writing essays at school. While those can be great, you need to use the language in order to improve your pronunciation. You can’t really  study pronunciation –rather, it’s a physical skill (much like playing football or video games) that you need to practice regularly. In this post, you will get some tools to improve your pronunciation that actually work.

Firstly, there is nothing wrong with having a unique accent. You learn more about accent reduction it or work on making your speaking easier to understand, but remember that there are many different varieties of spoken English all over the world, and each one has its own unique flavor. There is no better or worse and people should embrace language diversity as a positive. However, it is important that your accent is clear and that people understand what you are saying.

This free guide , therefore, is not trying to change your identity. The mission of this guide is to make you speak more clearly in a business context . And, as you’ll see, improving your pronunciation has a host of powerful benefits that can help you take your career to the next level.

How to Improve Your English Pronunciation

Improving your English pronunciation has clear benefits. First of all, you will save time, as you won’t need to repeat yourself as often. You will feel more included at work and experience less native speaker bias, also called accent bias (read what this is in the pronunciation guide above). And most importantly –you will feel more confident speaking English.

If you are ready to improve your accent, here are some effective strategies to get you started.

1. Focus on speaking, not reading

Just like you can’t really learn to dance without dancing, you can’t improve your pronunciation without speaking. Use every opportunity you have to try speaking with other speakers. Chat with colleagues from work, attend a local language meetup (as soon as Covid allows), talk to yourself! Saying things out loud will help you build your confidence quickly and give you a better intuition for the correct pronunciation.

2. Sing a song

Read the lyrics of the songs you like and sing along. Try to pronounce sounds correctly and imitate the singer’s accent. It might be challenging at the beginning, but this is a great way to learn how to link words and find out how native speakers speak informally.

3. Identify your problem sounds

The first step is to identify your problem sounds. These are the sounds you may not be pronouncing correctly and that make your speech less clear. Read a text outloud and try to single out those sounds that you find difficult and practice them with videos and podcasts . If you are not sure about your problem sounds, you can start here: How To Pronounce The Most Difficult English Sounds Correctly .

4. Record yourself

You will find recording yourself as uncomfortable as helpful. Once you have identified your problem sounds, record yourself while practicing them. This is an effective strategy because it allows you to compare your pronunciation to the target sound.

Read fragments out loud and spot the mistakes you make. Then, repeat them over again until it starts to sound right. Keep some of your recordings and listen to them every now and then –you will find out how much of a progress you are making!

5. Learn in chunks (rather than isolated words)

Each phrase has a melody, like a piece of music. This melody is important because it is how native speakers decode what you’re saying. While there are great pronunciation guides that teach you how to find the stressed syllable, one quick and easy way to improve your melody is to learn entire phrases rather than isolated words. This way, you will learn how those words should be pronounced together.

Practice linking words with Lisa’s video on YouTube.

6. Try audio shadowing

Take your favorite podcast or radio show and try repeating a fragment of the audio mimicking the speaker. This is called shadowing , a powerful technique that will help you feel more in tune with the language and better understand pronunciation and intonation patterns. It’s basically the next level to singing a song, as you imitate actual conversations.

First, prepare an audio file and its transcript (you can use TED talks, a book and its audiobook, or a podcast with the transcript available). First, listen to it as you follow the text. Then, practice mimicking the speaker, repeat exactly the same words with the same pronunciation and intonation.

Find some inspiration on your favorite audio resources here .

Keep Improving Your English Pronunciation

Download the full guide for free to access all the videos and tips. If you are looking for help from a experienced instructor, get in touch with Talaera  and we will match you with the right teacher.

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Related articles:

How To Pronounce The Most Difficult English Sounds Correctly

How To Effectively Reduce Your Accent in English

How to Express Yourself Confidently in Meetings When English is Not Your First Language

How To Ask For Clarification Like A Native English Speaker

[Note: article originally posted in October 2019 and updated in January 2022]

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The Importance of Pronunciation in English: How to Speak Clearly

English pronunciation is incredibly important if you want to be understood and avoid miscommunications.

Pronunciation should never be overlooked, so below you’ll find essential mistakes to avoid and resources to improve your overall pronunciation skills .

With better pronunciation, you’ll be one step closer to English fluency .

Why Is English Pronunciation Important? 

The most important mistakes to avoid for perfect pronunciation, 1. not paying attention to word stress, 2. forgetting to use correct intonation, 3. saying heteronyms the same way, 4. sounding out each vowel only one way, 5. pronouncing “th” only one way, 6. vocalizing silent letters, the best resources to practice english pronunciation, and one more thing....

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

New English speakers can be easily misunderstood when pronouncing words incorrectly.

Furthermore, when even only one word is pronounced incorrectly, many people will think they understood you and therefore won’t ask for clarification. This can lead to some very confusing miscommunications !

That’s why it’s important to identify and fix common pronunciation mistakes to create smoother relationships with new English-speaking friends, business contacts, service people such as waiters or hairdressers and many others.

If you’d like to see some of these mistakes demonstrated verbally, check out the following video:

When used in the context of linguistics, word stress  essentially refers to the syllable in a word that’s emphasized the most.

Some languages, like Spanish, use accents to show stress, but English offers no such easy trick. Stress is very important when speaking English because a word can entirely change meaning depending on where you put the stress .

For the purpose of the examples here, I’ll divide syllables with dashes and show stress with bold text. Consider the word “contest,” which has two syllables: con-test.

You can either put stress on the first syllable or the second, which would be as follows.

a contest — / con -test/

to contest — /con- test /

The word with stress on the first syllable is a noun that means “a competition.” The word with stress on the second syllable is a verb that means “to oppose.” Note that in this case, the word stress not only changes the meaning of the word but also the part of speech (noun vs. verb).

Let’s look at another example. The word “present” has two syllables that can be broken up and stressed differently depending on what you wish to say.

a present — / pres -ent/ 

to present — /pre- sent / 

The first example is a noun meaning “a gift.” The second is a verb that means “to introduce.”

The website Word Stress is a great resource to practice pronunciation with correct word stress. It breaks words down into syllables and you have to guess which syllable you think the word stress falls on. 

It helpfully tracks the number of words you get correct, so you can see your progress as you practice. Plus, you can click to reveal a word’s part of speech, definition, stress and its International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols .

If you didn’t raise or lower your voice at certain parts of each sentence, you’d sound like a robot!

Intonation involves the rise and fall of your voice when speaking in full sentences. Incorrect intonation can change the meaning of a sentence or just sound very strange to native speakers. It’s especially important for conveying feelings or adding nuance to sentences.

For example, think about the sentence, “Why are you home so late?”

Imagine asking your spouse this simple question, genuinely wondering why he or she is home late. Practice the question aloud with a tone of curiosity. Perhaps you’d use a light falling intonation at the end of your sentence.

Now, practice saying it while imagining that you’re angry, believing that your spouse has been out doing something you aren’t happy about. When using an accusatory tone, your pitch might rapidly rise and fall.

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Heteronyms are words that are spelled exactly the same way but mean different things .

For example, “read” looks the exact same in both the present and past tense.

However, the pronunciation is quite different, with the present tense using a long “e” sound, like “reed,” and the past tense using the short “e” sound, like “red.” 

I read  every day.

I read a chapter last night. 

To avoid this mistake, learners should take the time to familiarize themselves with some of the most frequently used heteronyms. Here’s a helpful list of common heteronyms and how to pronounce them.

English vowels can be complicated and one letter can have many different sounds .

For example, the little vowel “o” has three distinct sounds, and that’s without considering vowel combination sounds! Listen to the following words.

Notice how each “o” is pronounced differently.

It’s really important that learners take the time to study every possible sound made by English vowels. For an in-depth guide on all the English vowel sounds, check out this article .

Here’s another mistake similar to the one above. The English syllable “th” has two distinct pronunciations , which many English learners tend to forget.

“Th” can either be voiced (with vocal chord vibration) or voiceless (without vocal chord vibration). Here’s how that actually sounds.

than — voiced “th” 

path — voiceless “th”

The easiest way to tell the difference is to put your fingers on your throat and see if you can feel vibrations.

You can see and hear a list of words that use the voiced “th” on this page from the University of California Berkeley . They also have one for the voiceless “th” here .

It’s important to remember that pronunciation doesn’t always go by the letters in a word. Very often, certain letters aren’t pronounced in English words .

Consider the word “used” in the following two sentences. When alone, as in the first sentence, you pronounce the final “d” in “used.” However, when it’s a part of the phrase “used to,” the final “d” sound is dropped.

used — I used the last of the shampoo.

used to — I used to hate broccoli.

Ah! Tricky, right? Here’s a helpful video on some of the most common silent letters in English.

After all that, it would be a good idea to practice even more! There are many diverse online resources you can use to practice English pronunciation and the following are a great place to start.

BBC Learning English

You can start with their series “Tim’s Pronunciation Workshop,” which tackles a variety of pronunciation topics and, as a bonus, includes transcripts for the videos.

At the bottom of this site, you can also find video instructions to pronounce individual sounds in English.

Cambridge Dictionary

As an added incentive, the site lets you create vocabulary lists and quizzes so you can save and work on the words giving you particular pronunciation trouble.

Minimal Pairs

Focusing on minimal pairs helps fine-tune your ear in English and catch your own bad pronunciation habits.

Phonetic Alphabet Course on Memrise

It’s a good idea to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, as they’re widely used to write phonetic notations.

If you know the IPA, you can understand the correct pronunciation of a word just by looking it up in the dictionary and reading its IPA spelling.

You can practice the IPA with audio and exercises on Memrise , a language learning site that centers around memorization. They break the IPA down into 14 lessons.

In addition to these online resources, you can also use songs to practice your English pronunciation in a fun and engaging way! 

Hopefully, you recognize the necessity of studying pronunciation and are ready to dedicate new time and energy to mastering this important English skill!

If you like learning English through movies and online media, you should also check out FluentU. FluentU lets you learn English from popular talk shows, catchy music videos and funny commercials , as you can see here:

If you want to watch it, the FluentU app has probably got it.

The FluentU app and website makes it really easy to watch English videos. There are captions that are interactive. That means you can tap on any word to see an image, definition, and useful examples.

FluentU lets you learn engaging content with world famous celebrities.

For example, when you tap on the word "searching," you see this:

FluentU lets you tap to look up any word.

Learn all the vocabulary in any video with quizzes. Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning.

FluentU helps you learn fast with useful questions and multiple examples. Learn more.

The best part? FluentU remembers the vocabulary that you’re learning. It gives you extra practice with difficult words—and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. You have a truly personalized experience.

Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)

Related posts:

English Paragraphs for Reading: 10 Easy Resources

10 Catchy Songs to Improve Your English Pronunciation

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