by Marama Carmichael

Created on: February 10, 2010

English pronunciation is an important part of learning English, but many ESL students go about trying to improve it the wrong way. When you want to improve your grammar do you sit down and just study 'grammar' or do you focus on a particular area that you've been having difficulty with, for instance articles or prepositions? Likewise to improve writing do you just sit down and write anything you can or do you practice what you need to, for example you need to improve your letter writing skills so you practice letter writing or you need to improve your essay skills so you practice writing essays? Why should improving your pronunciation be any different? If you break it down you will find it a much easier area to deal with and to improve.

First, find out what your problem areas are. These will be different for everyone, and can depend on issues such as first language, previous teachers and language learning experience, or even the size, shape or ability of your tongue. If your first language is Japanese, for example you may have particular problems with 'l' and 'r'  because in Japanese they are the same sound and your tongue finds it difficult to produce the two separate positions required to make the sounds correctly. Or perhaps at high school you learnt to say 'clothe-es' instead of 'clothes' and you can't seem to break the habit. Whatever the problem is, first you have to find it before you try to fix it. Ways to do this might be to hire a native English teacher or use the one you already have and ask them to write down all the pronunciation mistakes you make, then go through them with you. That way you can find your problems, learn how to say them correctly and then practice them until you can. Another way is to listen to native English speakers and see if you say things differently from them. Or if the person you are talking to asks you to repeat yourself several times it's probably due to a pronunciation problem so use it as a clue to try to figure out what it is.

Common individual problems may be sounds (such as 'l' and 'r' or 'th'); word stress (such as re-cord, or record); long difficult words (like enthusiasm); sentence stress; fluidity; or intonation. Once you've found a problem area, then you can begin to work on a solution.

Sounds: Find out how to say it correctly. Look at the right mouth and tongue position and then look at yourself in the mirror to make sure you are doing it correctly. Practice

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