WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:08.720 Hello, welcome to IEL's podcast. This episode is going to be all about pronunciation 00:09.440 --> 00:20.680 We're going to look at some of the components of pronunciation, goals, how to be understood, problems 00:20.680 --> 00:29.980 regarding being understood, and some factors that influence pronunciation. So it's quite a lot of information 00:29.980 --> 00:37.000 here in this podcast. So I think to get the maximum benefit from this 00:37.000 --> 00:43.560 you could take notes, improve your note-taking ability. You're also going to improve your vocabulary 00:44.840 --> 00:50.000 And also, you're probably, if you implement some of the instructions or tips 00:50.640 --> 00:58.520 you're probably going to improve your pronunciation or at least find out where the problems are 00:58.520 --> 01:06.200 becoming more aware of what factors influence pronunciation so let's get started let's 01:06.200 --> 01:14.040 have a look at some of the factors to start off with age now unfortunately at the moment we 01:14.040 --> 01:24.920 cannot really influence this factor so what i mean by age is maybe the amount of time you've been 01:24.920 --> 01:28.500 learning the language or maybe the amount of time you've been living in the country 01:28.500 --> 01:37.820 and this does have an effect logically the longer you are there than more likely you are to speak 01:37.820 --> 01:48.060 with that with that accent however this is quite well as one thing I want to make clear here 01:48.060 --> 01:55.460 obviously you need to be integrated into that country so what a lot of people can do is 01:55.460 --> 02:00.040 maybe go to a foreign country and only hang out with people from their own country which is 02:00.040 --> 02:05.640 kind of ridiculous really and but this brings me on to the next point which is exposure 02:05.640 --> 02:12.700 exposure to the language is also going to affect how you um how you are well affect your pronunciation 02:12.700 --> 02:20.920 and this is a factor that we can have totally under our control so we might as well use it 02:20.920 --> 02:34.260 to our own advantage and for example somebody who's living in in Poland and listening to podcasts 24-7 is going to have more exposure to the English language 02:34.260 --> 02:39.460 than somebody than a Polish person living in London and hanging out with Polish friends and 02:39.460 --> 02:44.820 working with Polish friends. So this is what I was going to say about the exposure level 02:44.820 --> 02:51.060 So because it's under your control, I strongly recommend you take advantage of this 02:51.060 --> 02:54.740 and just put your life in English. And I've said that a million times before 02:55.460 --> 03:05.280 Now the other factor that's going to affect your pronunciation is your own language 03:05.280 --> 03:14.900 So if your language is rather similar to English, and these languages might include Dutch 03:14.900 --> 03:21.640 German, some of the Scandinavian languages, I don't think Finnish, but definitely Norwegian 03:21.640 --> 03:31.220 and Swedish, these languages are similar. similar to English. In fact, English is a Germanic language and it's got a lot of Norwegian 03:31.220 --> 03:38.760 words, Swedish words, German words and Dutch words, and especially Dutch and German grammar 03:38.760 --> 03:46.160 So this is why it's probably easier for people from those countries to learn English 03:46.160 --> 03:54.720 And it's probably why they've got better English writing skills and better scores. However, you don't want to beat yourself up about this 03:54.720 --> 04:02.120 Okay, you don't want to be comparing yourself to these people because they've just got a slightly natural advantage 04:02.120 --> 04:10.640 So for example if you're I don't know if you're Chinese and you want to learn Japanese you've got an advantage there and the Scandinavians 04:10.960 --> 04:18.959 Would it be able would find it much more difficult So there's no point comparing yourself with the other people 04:21.440 --> 04:27.120 I've just made a note here that the race is long and it's with yourself at the end of the day 04:27.820 --> 04:33.020 And by the way, if you do start comparing yourself with other people, this is a guaranteed way to fail 04:33.240 --> 04:39.500 because the only comparisons with yourself and improving your own self. So anyway, let's carry on 04:40.080 --> 04:47.840 Now, the other factor is your phonetic ability. Okay, this basically means your ability to distinguish between sounds 04:49.840 --> 04:58.540 So it's like your ear for the language. If you can hear the differences between boss and bus 04:59.340 --> 05:08.760 if you can hear the differences between certain words and stresses. And this is an ability that everybody's got 05:08.880 --> 05:12.820 Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to speak their own language or understand their own language 05:13.360 --> 05:21.780 So you've definitely got this ability. Now, the key is, is can you improve this ability 05:21.780 --> 05:37.030 Can you adapt it? can you make it can you become accustomed to other languages and other accents So this is also under our control and I think one of the best ways is through exposure 05:37.030 --> 05:46.190 Let's increase the exposure to start listening to AIOTS practice tests, start listening to stuff that we enjoy, material that we enjoy 05:46.190 --> 05:55.030 Now this brings you on to the next one. I mean, on to the next point, what's your goal regarding English pronunciation 05:55.030 --> 06:02.410 Do you want to speak like a native speaker? And that's quite ambiguous, I mean, because native speakers come from Liverpool, from Scotland 06:02.410 --> 06:16.910 from London, from Yorkshire, from all over the place. And maybe a goal wouldn't exactly be to speak like a Liverpoolian 06:16.910 --> 06:23.450 One friend said that, okay, if you want to speak like a Liverpoolian, you might as well sound like a criminal, but that's a bit unfair 06:23.450 --> 06:28.330 Well, thankfully, well, I doubt it that I've got any Liverpoolian listeners 06:28.490 --> 06:33.870 Anyway, so let's carry on. So what's a more realistic or what's a more intelligent goal 06:34.250 --> 06:42.910 That's probably to be understood. Okay, and this goes back to similar concepts in the essay writing 06:43.530 --> 06:52.690 Okay, with your essay writing, you want to be understood. You want to make sure that the examiners understood that you've got the task response under control 06:53.450 --> 07:02.229 Likewise, when you're in that speaking test, you want to be understood. Because even though you might be using the best vocabulary or the best grammar structures 07:02.950 --> 07:13.070 if you're not being understood, then the examiner can't give you any points regarding if you've actually answered the correct question 07:14.410 --> 07:23.570 So just bear this in mind. Here's some quick exam tips. When we're actually in the exam, we sit up straight 07:23.770 --> 07:27.530 I've just done that now. I've reminded myself. We sit up straight 07:28.570 --> 07:33.430 This helps the airflow. We breathe slower. We talk a little bit louder 07:34.330 --> 07:38.470 This also increases comprehension for the listener. We speak a little bit slower 07:38.850 --> 07:47.430 This also increases comprehension. And we also try and vocalize. That means we don't swallow any of the end parts of the word 07:47.430 --> 07:58.750 Like I was talking to a student from Venezuela, but she, who's living in Toronto and everybody there in Toronto in Canada, but in Toronto, they say 07:58.750 --> 08:03.110 Toronto and that's just their accent but they swallow the tea, they don't bother saying 08:03.110 --> 08:07.169 it. So if you're not familiar about that, it might be a bit difficult to understand 08:07.169 --> 08:12.770 it if the first time you hear it, like what's Toronto, what's Toronto? Obviously the 08:12.770 --> 08:16.530 context is going to help you as well but what I'm saying is that if you're vocalizing 08:16.530 --> 08:21.330 then you're not going to swallow a single sound. You're going to 08:21.330 --> 08:27.110 to pronounce every part of the sentence. That just makes it crystal clear for the listener 08:28.390 --> 08:37.910 This is what I do a lot, actually, just from my teaching experience, because the class goes a lot more, goes a lot faster if I'm vocalizing 08:38.470 --> 08:47.310 and everybody can follow along there. However, I've been teaching so long now that this vocalizing skill 08:47.310 --> 08:53.610 or vocalizing effect that I'm doing, is now crossed over into my everyday speech 08:54.330 --> 08:59.150 So some people say that I don't sound English anymore because I vocalizing all the time 08:59.589 --> 09:07.650 whereas native English speakers will speak faster, closed, and probably use more colloquial language 09:08.650 --> 09:12.450 So yeah, I remember actually just a few months ago somebody in the train station said 09:12.450 --> 09:19.330 oh, you've got excellent English skills. Like, cheers. Thanks a bunch. Anyway, let's carry on 09:19.330 --> 09:31.030 So some quick tips there for improving your intelligibility. Now then, let's go into some of the aspects of pronunciation 09:31.950 --> 09:44.530 So the rhythm. English has a certain rhythm and it's got a tendency for some of the stresses or the strong beats in the sentence 09:44.530 --> 09:56.450 to actually fall on nouns. adverbs, adjectives and verbs, which are basically the words that are important to the sentence 09:57.170 --> 10:02.290 So if you just go back, you'd have probably heard me when I said rhythm 10:02.290 --> 10:08.650 and I was saying one of the aspects is rhythm. I stressed the rhythm, and I did it unconsciously 10:08.650 --> 10:15.570 but this is just part of the language that it's got a tendency to put importance on these words 10:15.570 --> 10:22.570 the nouns, the verbs, the adjectives and the adverbs. So if you introduce that into your 10:24.570 --> 10:32.570 pronunciation, you're going to improve your intelligibility. Now the stress, stress is important 10:32.570 --> 10:38.570 I've got a friend, he's from Paraguay and he always laughs at my pronunciation from Manchester 10:38.570 --> 10:45.550 He says, Manchester, and he really exaggerates the chest. And that's where the stress is in that 10:45.550 --> 10:51.329 word in that noun and likewise and to pronounce the capital city of England 10:51.329 --> 11:07.840 correctly it London okay London there a biggest stress at the end there London sorry at the beginning London but two two stresses in the words So this basically will come about through practice and through having a good ear 11:08.100 --> 11:16.940 improving your listening abilities. And like I said, a million times before, a really good way to improve your listening abilities is to transcribe 11:17.560 --> 11:24.020 Okay, and you can even mark the letters and the words where the stress is falling 11:24.020 --> 11:33.300 There's plenty of online exercises to do this. Perhaps translating, transcribing a song isn't the best idea 11:33.300 --> 11:39.260 because the words are going to be bent and stretched and squashed 11:39.260 --> 11:47.160 to fit the music, fit the lyrics and fit the melody. However, podcasts are really good 11:47.260 --> 11:53.460 and I'm pretty certain you can find some online exercises for this. Now then, sentence 11:54.020 --> 12:01.020 stress and this corresponds with the rhythm what I was saying about before with the rhythm 12:01.020 --> 12:07.520 that the important part of the sentence will be the part that gets the most stress 12:07.520 --> 12:15.500 okay so if I say there's a lot of people in town okay the stress there was 12:15.500 --> 12:24.000 probably in people and in town okay there's a lot of people in town now and 12:24.000 --> 12:32.080 If I said another sentence, for example, there isn't anyone here today, okay, there isn't 12:32.080 --> 12:47.420 anyone here today. The stress is on today. Okay? Because I want to emphasize that actually today there isn't that many people here or there's nobody. Okay 12:47.420 --> 13:00.860 So depending on what's the important component of the sentence. will determine or help to determine where the stress actually goes 13:01.940 --> 13:08.080 So perhaps, I mean, this might be a difficult thing to practice and it might be a difficult thing to master as well 13:08.080 --> 13:14.120 But just being aware of it and start being conscious of it 13:14.120 --> 13:23.000 will help you to incorporate it into your own speaking abilities. Now then, how could we use it 13:23.000 --> 13:32.560 this in the IEL's exam. Well, if the examiner asks us, for example, part three, and they're saying 13:32.680 --> 13:38.380 what qualities do you find important in a friend? Well, if we were going to answer this, we'd say 13:38.380 --> 13:46.240 well, some of the aspects or some of the characteristics I like to see in a friend are, blah, blah, blah 13:46.440 --> 13:51.420 but we've put a stress on friend there. We've reflected the sentence and we've put a bit of a 13:51.420 --> 13:56.880 stress on friend would probably do this naturally if we were an English speaker 13:56.880 --> 14:02.160 native English speaker so there's no reason why you can't put a bit of a 14:02.160 --> 14:07.900 stress there just a slight stress and this will make the examiner and make the 14:07.900 --> 14:13.780 examiner understand that you're answering the right question okay now if we 14:13.780 --> 14:18.280 were doing this for task one is the examiner might part one sorry the examiner 14:18.280 --> 14:27.760 might say. So where are you from? So he's help. Well I'm from Venezuela. A lovely town 14:27.760 --> 14:33.520 the capital city is my hometown. I've lived there for about 10 years but I recently 14:33.520 --> 14:39.860 moved to Mexico whatever wherever you are nowadays. So it's just a case of 14:39.860 --> 14:44.260 recognizing the important part of this sentence and this will also help you 14:44.260 --> 14:53.600 understand other people as well if you're having difficulty understanding this native speakers, especially English speakers, who tend to speak a little bit faster, then you 14:53.600 --> 15:00.860 just listen to the key nouns, the key verbs, and you can get the gist of the sentence 15:00.860 --> 15:13.100 So those are some of the aspects. Now then, let's move on to the next component, which is being understood 15:13.100 --> 15:18.260 So some of the issues or some of the problems that we might have 15:18.260 --> 15:25.600 when we're being understood could relate to about three or four issues. The first 15:25.600 --> 15:31.180 one might be the stress, where we're putting the stress, okay, if we're putting the 15:31.180 --> 15:39.579 stress on the connectors or some of the the less important fragments of the 15:39.579 --> 15:44.560 sentence then we're going to make it difficult for the actual listener because it 15:44.560 --> 15:54.120 just doesn't sound right. So some of the other problems might be related to your own language where you put the stress or maybe 15:54.120 --> 16:01.600 you carry over some of the components or aspects of your own language into English and 16:01.600 --> 16:05.680 this can make it really not really difficult but it can make it more challenging for the 16:05.680 --> 16:09.980 listener to understand what you're saying I'll give you an example I have an 16:09.980 --> 16:18.040 Italian friend and she always calls me Ben and I have to tell her obviously jokingly 16:18.280 --> 16:22.320 I have to tell I say, look, Ben has one syllable, Ben 16:22.400 --> 16:42.390 It's not Ben, nah. Yeah? And Italians do this quite frequently They put an A a vowel sound in the middle of the sentence or the middle between words where it not necessary I think another funny example of this is the Italian man in Malta or the Italian man in London 16:42.930 --> 16:56.250 It's quite a funny YouTube video where it just takes it to the extreme. I'm laughing now because I'm thinking about it, but, yeah, if you've got a few minutes, you might want to check that out if you just bought, preparing for a lot 16:56.590 --> 17:02.950 Anyway, yeah, it's always good to laugh at other people's problem. So anyway, moving on 17:03.890 --> 17:11.170 I remember when I was in Taiwan, there's another incident. I had a friend, I can't remember what his name was now 17:11.630 --> 17:17.710 but he always used to put la after it, and I think this is from Chinese 17:18.250 --> 17:22.230 where they just put la in between words or at the end of words 17:22.730 --> 17:27.210 So it'd be like, Ben La, are you coming to the swimming pool today? I'd be like what 17:27.890 --> 17:33.050 Ben La is this nickname? But then I heard him talk with other people 17:33.050 --> 17:37.510 and you'd be doing it all the time. I would be done to the swim pool la? Yeah 17:39.110 --> 17:43.810 What I'm saying is that you just need to be aware of that 17:43.810 --> 17:48.550 if you are bringing any of your own characteristics of your own language 17:48.550 --> 17:55.290 into your target language, which in this case is English. Now another interesting 17:55.290 --> 18:02.170 issue or challenge that we might have when we're trying to be understood is we 18:02.170 --> 18:09.030 might actually delete some of the sounds that are necessary and this is very 18:09.030 --> 18:18.450 frequent with the simple past so a lot of students do miss the ED sound okay 18:18.450 --> 18:30.150 so I watched the game last night that ED sound is incredibly important because it dictates the tense 18:30.150 --> 18:39.610 So, yeah, if just being aware of it, hopefully, we'll be able to avoid deleting that sound 18:39.610 --> 18:49.890 missing it completely. Now the next issue is called substitution. And this happens when we might not have the sound 18:49.890 --> 19:01.670 in our own language, in which case, we'll use a sound from um sorry yeah I'm just getting mixed up now so what I'm saying is that 19:01.670 --> 19:07.070 substitution and this will happen when we don't have the sound that they use in 19:07.070 --> 19:11.930 English or we would use in English in our own language so we'll substitute it 19:11.930 --> 19:19.730 with a sound that we do have in our own language now I'll give you a clue 19:19.730 --> 19:35.370 I'll give you an example from Spanish a lot of Spanish English, right, speakers of English will say da instead of the or do, yeah, the birthday is tomorrow 19:36.170 --> 19:42.390 And that's because they don't really have the TH, the TH, the TH, but they have the V or the D 19:42.930 --> 19:53.570 So they say, the birthday is tomorrow. Okay. And although it's legible and you do get used to it eventually 19:54.230 --> 20:00.770 However, it's not, it could be difficult for somebody who's not used to it or for a German 20:00.770 --> 20:09.350 speaker of English to understand the Spanish speaker, whereas if everybody learned the correct 20:09.350 --> 20:20.150 sound, then obviously it's going to be easier. So you might want to record yourself and just try and record yourself reading a text 20:20.150 --> 20:23.810 and then compare it to a native English speaker reading the text 20:24.230 --> 20:30.730 and this way you're going to be able to just see if there are any differences 20:30.730 --> 20:36.510 and this goes back to what I was saying before about improving your phonetic 20:36.510 --> 20:45.410 ability or ability to understand other sounds and components of the language right 20:45.410 --> 20:51.830 so that's everything and if you want to take this a bit further if you are 20:51.830 --> 20:56.870 serious about improving your language and you've got these goals to be understood 20:56.870 --> 21:01.970 or you want to speak like a native English speaker and there's a few links for 21:01.970 --> 21:05.610 more resources actually on the blog if you just find this blog post just put 21:05.610 --> 21:11.790 IEL's podcast pronunciation and there's also a course there and of course if you 21:11.790 --> 21:18.050 get the speaking confidence course at sentence guide.com there's quite a lot of 21:18.050 --> 21:25.070 videos they're showing you not only how to attack the exam and how to get the confidence you need and improve your fluency 21:26.070 --> 21:34.430 but also to working on technical aspects such as pronunciation and being understood by the examiner 21:35.210 --> 21:40.270 Okay, so I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. If you've got any suggestions, send me an email 21:40.510 --> 21:50.550 I'm always looking to improve them. I've approved the site. And, yeah, if you did enjoy it as well, you could leave us a review 21:50.550 --> 21:55.430 at iTunes. That'd be fantastic or on Google Play wherever. That'd be awesome 21:56.050 --> 22:01.010 And I hope you're enjoying these podcasts and have a fantastic day