Posts tagged pronunciation
Are You Having Difficulty With The ‘L’ Sound?

Often I have a lot of clients telling me that they are having difficulties with the ‘L’ sound. So why is it so hard to say the ‘L’ in words in English such as ‘ball’, when you already have this sound in your language as well? The reason is because there are differences in how we pronounce the ‘L’ sound in English.

Read More
Curious English

A common question I get from many of my clients of accent modification is, “why does it sound like that?” They are referring to the lack of one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol. English seems to be a toss salad with five exceptions accompanying each rule.

Read More
Intersection of Cochlear implants and English as a L2

While an intersection of a client’s hearing level with their familiarity with English may make effective therapy sessions seem out of reach, as communication experts, we return to the main intention of communication—to understand and be understood.

Read More
The Value of IPA in Accent Training

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of symbols standardized to represent sounds (or phonemes) of spoken language. It is the perfect alphabet in which every letter represents one phoneme only, and each phoneme has its appropriate symbol.

Read More
The Many Faces of T

T is often a difficult sound to grasp for non-native speakers of English, and it isn’t because the sound is hard to pronounce. Instead, it is because what we think of as the “T sound” is actually composed of several different sounds, and pronouncing the T correctly requires an understanding of the rules surrounding which version to use in a given word.

Read More