When we think about pronunciation we tend to think it is all about how we say words and sounds in English. However, it’s important to remember that pronunciation actually involves two key aspects.

Receptive ability:

In pronunciation your receptive skills are all about listening and hearing different sounds, words or features in spoken English. In your lessons at the British Council you may notice your teacher asks you to listen carefully the pronunciation in a listening track, and then asks you to identify, notice or categorise different sounds or features. 

Productive Ability:

The second key area of pronunciation is your ability to produce sounds and words accurately. After you have listened and heard the sounds or features you are trying to improve it’s important that you practise saying them as clearly and accurately as you can. 

The Sounds of English

When learning to improve your English pronunciation the first things to make sure you get right are the sounds, or phonemes, of English. 

All of the different sounds of English can be found in the phonemic chart, which you can access or download here. 

Click on the different phonemes in the chart to hear how they sound, and an example word which contains that sound. Try practising the sounds and words as you hear them.

The Phonemic Chart

The phonemic chart is organized into three sections

Vowels

You will notice that some sounds have a ‘:’ next to them, this means that these vowels are longer sounds. Phonemes without a ‘:’ mean that they are short sounds which are said quickly.

Consonants

Most of the consonant sounds are organised into pairs of sounds that are produced in a similar way, for example the /b/ and /p/ sounds are both made at the front of your mouth by closing then opening your lips. 

Dipthongs

A diphthong is a combination of two vowels sounds. For example in the word ‘they’, we combine the vowel sounds /e/ and /I/ to create the /eI/ diphthong.

The Features of Pronunciation

Once you’re confident with the individual sounds of English, the next things to focus on are the features of pronunciation. You can find more information and videos on these features below.

Stress

Word stress is all about choosing the syllable in a word which is strongest or has the most prominence. For example the word ‘student’ has 2 syllables, and the stress is on the first syllable ‘Student’. 

Sentence stress is all about identifying which words in a sentence are the most important. Normally the stressed words in a sentence are those which carry the important meaning. For example, in the sentence ‘I went to England for a holiday’ the words that carry the meaning are ‘went’ – our main verb ‘England’ – our subject, and ‘holiday’ – out object. So the stress in this sentence would be ‘I went to England for a holiday’  

Weak forms

Now we know that some words and sounds in English are stressed i.e. said in a strong way, it’s important to know that unstressed sounds or ‘weak forms’ also need to be produced accurately. In our example sentence above ‘I went to England for a holiday’ we have 4 examples of weak forms ‘I went to England for a holiday’ all of these words are said using the /ə/ or ‘schwa’ sound. Find more information about using the schwa sound here.

Linking sounds

In English we often link the sounds of two different words to ensure our speech is smooth and at a good pace. There are various ways we link words and there are rules you can learn. 

The three key ways we link are: 

  1. Consonant to consonant linking e.g first time, she’s sad. 
  2. Consonant to vowel linking e.g an apple, was I. 
  3. Vowel to vowel linking (also known as intrusive sounds) e.g to /w/ England, play /j/ again.
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