11 Ways to Completely Revamp Your English Pronunciation

If you are currently working towards improving your English pronunciation clarity (or if you’d like to start), you’ll know that it’s such a specific and interesting process, but in other ways, it is quite similar to many other personal growth endeavours that you’ve embarked upon in your lifetime.

When we decide to learn something new we often start with little to no idea about the topic. We learn a few key things that make us feel like we know all the secrets! Eureka! But unfortunately we don’t stop there…

We keep diving deeper and deeper (as we should!), and suddenly our increasing awareness leads us to take that infamous step into… knowing that there is so much we don’t know…while also knowing that we don’t know how much we don’t know. Is your head spinning yet?

Times like these call for none other than a revamp to keep morale and motivation high, and to keep us stepping closer and closer to those goals that we have our hearts set on. If your English pronunciation needs a revamp, take a look at these 11 ways that you can do exactly that.
So let’s now explore 11 new ways you can refresh and improve your English pronunciation…

At Speechaus Clinic, we’re not into the new-year’s-resolution style of goal setting, unless, of course, it turns into something tangible. Imagine that we’ve decided that we want to increase our fitness. That goal in itself will vary drastically from person to person, and, let’s be honest, it means a whole lot of nothing until we work out what our current fitness level is, what specific elements of fitness we want to improve, what kinds of exercise we have access to, and more!

Improving your pronunciation clarity (and we mean really improving it, not just mentioning it on January 1st), requires thorough data analysis and a translation of what that data means for you and your pronunciation needs specifically. This is where we come in.

The whole point of a baseline is that we grow away from it. When that happens, you have two choices: continue to grow or plateau. If you chose option number one, new baseline data is your winning ticket.

Setting and achieving goals is all about having a growth mindset. Identify what motivates your ambition in this particular direction and make sure you listen to the kind of language you use with yourself. The emotional impact of not being understood or feeling that your pronunciation stands in the way of your identity or career is valid and a true challenge. Give these emotions the respect they deserve and then frame them as positive growth-based goals like:

“I will enhance my clarity to promote greater comprehension in my communication with my colleagues”

or

“I will learn to produce sounds clearly to increase my confidence when expressing my ideas in English.”

Once you have identified why pronunciation clarity is important to you specifically, be sure to share your motivation with our team so we can provide strategies and advocacy best suited to the context and purpose of your goal.

We won’t deny it, there is something inherently frustrating about not being able to instantly pronounce something exactly how we want to. Let’s have a think about why that might be the case.

We started from the top now we’re… here.

We are EXPERT communicators in our native languages, and learning a new language doesn’t change this fact at all, but it does mean that we’re suddenly applying our expertise to unfamiliar techniques.

Imagine if an Olympic swimmer decided to switch to elite-level tennis. They would perhaps have the advantage of their athleticism, but they would need to adopt an entirely new set of motoric physical skills, and let’s be honest, if they compared it with their experience at the Olympics, they’d probably feel quite frustrated to only be at community-level competition!

Pronunciation clarity, like sport, also requires a motoric physical skill set, so pace yourself realistically (our clinicians will help you!) and be understanding of the time and discipline it will take to progress through incremental steps towards your pronunciation goals.

Our identity is tied up in our communication in more ways than we can even imagine. Have a think about which elements of your pronunciation are important to expressing your authentic self. For example:

• Would you prefer to have more precise pronunciation at work but then relaxed speech sounds at home?
  
• Would you prefer to adopt the regional accent of where you’re living or do you prefer an accent system you have studied?
  
• Would you prefer that people don’t ask about your origin when they hear you speak or do you like that your speech reflects your heritage?

Our clinicians can help you explore all of these concepts with all the empathy they have gained from their own multilingual lived experiences.

Anyone who has constant, unwavering motivation when working towards a goal is living the dream as far as we’re concerned! The truth of any kind of training is that there will always be days (even weeks or months!) in which motivation runs dry, and that is precisely when our good friend discipline needs to take over. If you find that you’re not making progress towards your pronunciation goals, give yourself a really honest evaluation of how consistent and disciplined your practice has been recently. But no harsh self-talk please! Discipline is born from realistic goals; speak to your Voice Science clinician for help establishing a practice routine.

As you work with the Speechaus team, our speech pathologists will give you all the pieces of the puzzle in terms of pronouncing your target sounds. You might find that some occur quite naturally in your mouth and others are make-or-break! Our clinicians can help you choose specific to you personally what you should pay the most attention to when you’re setting up your speech sounds. This is also a useful way to troubleshoot any sounds you’ve been working on for a while!

Aside from some very impressive parrots, learning to pronounce English speech is exclusively human, so we can’t ignore human nature in the process! We are drawn to things that we enjoy, things that are motivating and engaging. Be sure to find fun ways to practise, here are some we prepared earlier!

We’re so lucky at Speechaus to have such wonderful clients that we honestly feel quite sad saying goodbye to them at the end of their pronunciation programs. We make a point of reminding clients that we’re always here if they ever need anything in future, and the response is quite often a sigh of relief! Our silver, gold, and platinum programs give structure but aren’t designed to set any kind of limit, so always feel free to decide for yourself what aligns with your goals if you’d ever like to re-engage with the team!

Have you ever noticed that sometimes even perfectly pronounced speech sounds still leave something to be desired? Congratulations, this means that you are accessing elite level pronunciation awareness!

At Speechaus, we guide you through layers starting with consonants and vowels, moving up through rhythm and stress, linking and flow, and intonation and resonance. (If you’re interested in the “and beyond” layer, see details about the C-suite!)

Take some time to reflect on which of the layers mentioned above are currently standing in the way of your English pronunciation goals. If it’s hard to be sure, give yourself some credit: pronunciation and accent is multifaceted and complex, but sometimes hypothesising, or simply identifying that there is something acting as a pronunciation challenge is the best initial step. Why? Because through identification, we can start to outline solutions.

We highly recommend that you don’t ask the people around you for pronunciation advice, and here’s why.

If you ask a native English speaker how to pronounce the word “button”, they’ll probably with an unmistakable /t/ in the middle:

• “button” /bʌtən/

But then later on they ask you to push a “bu’on” and you’re wondering where that /t/ from earlier disappeared to!

These are two completely acceptable variations in English, but this example highlights that simply being a native speaker does not give us any scientific or linguistic awareness of the specific phonetic processes that are occurring when we speak. Bring questions to the trained professionals at Speechaus! It’s our bread and butter/bu’er!

So there you have it, 11 strategies to push your English pronunciation closer to your personal and professional clarity goals. Whether for the first time or as a next step, the time to revamp your pronunciation is now!

If working on pronunciation has made you see the many dimensions of communication and left you hungry for more communication guidance, you might like to take another learning safari into the wide open plains of professional career-based communication.

Compelling communication is not a fluke.

Getting the influence you can only dream of counts on you drilling down, planning and refining your interpersonal skills.

It’s easy to feel frustrated with your communication when your speaking is unclear. It’s also much harder to express yourself well and move forward in your career if you are still bogged down by getting all the sounds out!

We need to tell you, we all have an accent and we are here to advocate for our internationals and polyglots.

So listen very carefully…

No accent is superior to another. In fact our clinicians hold the view that if your speaking shows you speak another language, that is actually a good position to be in.

There is so much current research about the benefits of bilingualism. Bilinguals are more tolerant, empathetic, creative… Just google “benefits of bilinguals.” There is a lot to be said for speaking more than another language.

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