How to improve your IELTS speaking score: 10 common Idioms

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How to improve your English pronunciation (by yourself)

I have been an English Language instructor for more than 6 years and I have noticed that my students who have the best pronunciation did one thing that you can do at home alone. In this lesson, you will learn this technique improving your pronunciation!

So many students spend weeks or even years focusing on pronunciation rules, individual sounds and intonation rules. Although these are helpful and are a good idea to learn, they certainly should not be your focus nor are they the most effective way of improving your pronunciation.

The most effective way is imitation.

So what do I mean by imitation? Well quite simply this means that you listen to and repeat phrases or sentences in English; not individual word, phrases or sentences!

Best of all, nowadays, with the help of the internet and in particular YouTube, you can do this at a home, alone and for free!

Let’s look at at the most effective method to do this.

STEP 1 – FIND A VIDEO YOU ARE INTERESTED IN

First, search for a Youtube video about something that you are interested in. This can be anything you are interested in! For example, if you like playing guitar, like me. You might search for an interview with a famous guitarist.

If your English level is too low to use authentic or real interviews, there are many listening practice videos for English learners on YouTube. Also, kids stories, which can also be found on YouTube are a great source. However, many of these videos use a computer-generated voice. Avoid these videos if you can; they don’t sound natural.

If you are studying IELTS, our sample answer videos are a great source of listening material. They can be found here.

STEP 2 - LISTEN TO CHECK SOUND QUALITY AND SPEAKING LEVEL

Next, watch the video for just a few seconds! It’s a good idea to use headphones for this.

If the sound quality of the video is very poor, go back and find a new video. Don’t waste your time on videos that are difficult to hear because the audio was not recorded well. Learning English is difficult enough without listening to bad quality audio.

If you can understand the speaking, that’s great, you don’t need to do anything. If it is too difficult, you can turn on the subtitles…IN ENGLISH. You could also slow down the video using the settings button at the bottom of the video player. However, I wouldn’t recommend slowing the video down too much as it will be difficult to hear;a speed of 75% (0.75) should be fine.

STEP 3 – TURN ON YOUR SMARTPHONE AUDIO RECORDER

The third step is very easy! Open the sound recorder app on your smartphone and start recording.

STEP 4 – LISTEN AND REPEAT!

Next , listen to 5-10 seconds of the video and repeat what you hear. Try to repeat exactly what you hear including intonation(the rising and falling of your voice). In my experience, you should pay particular attention to the final sound of each word as English learners tend to forget this.

STEP 5 – LISTEN AND CHECK!

Finally listen to the recording on your phone and compare it to the video…do they sound similar? Great. Are they completely different?…try again!

Yes, this technique will take some time and you will need to be patient. However, it really allow you to acquire natural pronunciation!

Thanks for reading guys! I hope you found this article helpful .