Pronunciation is 25% of your overall speaking band score and so it is obviously important that you work on it. This can be hard to do though if you are living in a country where English is not spoken and you do not have much chance to practise speaking. In this post I am going to suggest a cool website that may help you out if you are a computer person – it’s English Central.
How does it work?
English Central is a video channel site where you listen to a video (mostly of Barack Obama!) and then get a chance to record yourself saying the words on the video. The really clever part is that it tells you if you make a mistake in your pronunciation and then allows you to repeat again until you get the pronunciation correct. It also has other features explained in my video tutorial further down the page.
One point to note is that you will need a computer with a sensitive microphone to make it work. But if you love computers and playing with technology, it is fantastic fun and fun does tend to be good for learning. Do try it out.
Is it perfect?
Of course not. Nothing in life is. The major drawback is that it only really looks at the sounds you make when you speak and this is not all of pronunciation. For good pronunciation you also need to think about stress and intonation – I hope to show you ways to improve those in later posts.
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