Improve your English pronunciation with this series of free video lessons. Learn about English sounds, stress, weak forms and other topics which will help you to speak English fluently and naturally. Enjoy browsing through these Oxford Online English archives.
In this lesson, you can learn how to read IPA and use it correctly. You’ll see how using IPA can improve your English pronunciation and help you to avoid pronunciation mistakes.
IPA stands for ‘international phonetic alphabet’. It allows English to be read and written phonetically, so one symbol = one sound.
In this lesson, you can learn how elision can help you to understand fast speech and also talk more fluently in English.
Elision is when some words or parts of a word are not pronounced. For example, a letter might not be pronounced, or a syllable might disappear, or sometimes even whole words are not pronounced fully. Learning about elision will help your listening and—if you can use it yourself—help your speaking, too!
In this lesson, you can learn about English vowel sounds, and how to pronounce them.
This lesson will give you an overview of the pronunciation of English vowel sounds. You’ll see what vowel sounds exist in English, how to pronounce them, and common spelling patterns for each one.
In this lesson, you can learn about sentence stress in English.
Stress means that you pronounce some syllables more strongly than others. There are many different types of stress in English, and stress is used in many different ways.
Pronouncing sentence stress correctly will make a big difference to your English pronunciation. You’ll immediately sound clearer and more natural when you speak English.
In this lesson, you can learn about intonation in English. How important is intonation? Let’s see. Look at a sentence: Do you need some help?
By changing the intonation of this question, you can sound polite, annoyed, sarcastic, surprised, or many other things.
You can see that intonation is a very powerful tool. Controlling your intonation is important for communication in spoken English.