Deviprasad Goenka Management college of Media Studies http://www.dgmcms.org.in/ Subject:English Pronunciation Lesson :English Pronunciation Faculty Name: Saurabh Deshpande

2.  Pronunciation is probably one of the hardest
skills in English to learn.
 It takes a lot of time and effort to improve your
pronunciation.
 Some non-native speakers live for a long time
in an English-speaking country but still have
poor pronunciation.
 Other speakers seem to pick up English
pronunciation with little effort, and some may
do so without visiting an English-speaking
country at all!

3. 
Nobody knows quite why this happens. Perhaps it
is because some speakers have a better ‘ear’ for
languages than others?
 But age and previous language learning are also
thought to be factors, as well as having a sense of
‘musicality’.
 And of course, you are likely to improve your
pronunciation more quickly if you are doing
plenty of listening and speaking.
 This is why it is so crucial that you speak as much
English as you can outside the classroom.

4.  Having said this, it is certainly not necessary to
have native-speaker-like pronunciation.
 Your accent is part of you and your culture and
there is no need to lose it entirely.
 In fact, you probably wouldn’t want to.
 The real key to having good pronunciation is what
we call ‘comfortable intelligibility’.
 In other words, the person or people listening to
you should be able to understand what you are
saying with minimal strain.
 This is something completely different from losing
your accent entirely.

5.  Some of the most important reasons why
English pronunciation is believed to be so
difficult are :
 There are some sounds in English that
probably don’t exist in your own language –
for instance, English has 20 vowels and
diphthongs (many languages only have 5).
 There is no simple relationship between
spellings and sounds in English.

6.  English is a ‘stress-timed’ language – words
and sentences have strong and weak parts. This
is different to many other languages
throughout the world where parts of words
and words themselves may be given the same
stress in a sentence. .
 When English is spoken quickly, words are
linked smoothly together and sometimes
sounds even disappear altogether (this is called
assimilation). This means it can be hard to
understand, as well as speak English.

7. There are five main areas of difficulty in English
pronunciation. These are :
 Pronunciation of individual sounds
 Word stress
 Sentence stress
 Rhythm
 Intonation

8.  http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/lear
ning_english/leap/listeningandspeaking/pron
unciation/