Six Ways to Improve Your English Pronunciation (Part 2)
Image courtesy of Ben Grey via Flickr (CC 2.0)
In the first part, we discussed two key pronunciation features – individual sounds and word stress. Here are two more aspects that can change the way you sound when you speak English.
3. Sentence stress
A sentence in English generally has two kinds of words: content words and function words. The first kind are words that give you the overall meaning of the sentence, so they are normally nouns, main verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.
The second kind are usually small words that glue the sentence together to make grammatical sense. Naturally, function words are not usually stressed, whereas content words are. Here’s an example:
| Tom has a brother and a sister. | ||
| Content words: Tom, brother, sister | ||
| Function words: has, a, and, a | ||
Learners also need to be aware that the way they say a sentence can affect its meaning. In other words, depending on which word(s) in a sentence they stress, the meaning changes. Here’s an example:
| Question | What the speaker means |
| Why are you flying to London tomorrow? | What is the reason? |
| Why are you flying to London tomorrow? | Why not someone else? |
| Why are you flying to London tomorrow? | Why not travel by some other mode of transport? |
| Why are you flying to London tomorrow? | Why not some other place? |
| Why are you flying to London tomorrow? | Why not some other day? |
4. Weak forms
As we already know, some words in a sentence are stressed, while others are not. The words that aren’t are generally function words, and some of them have two pronunciations – a weak form and a strong form.
Generally speaking, we produce a weak form by changing the vowel sound in the word to a schwa /ə/. Here is the same example: Tom has a brother and a sister.
When saying this sentence, we use the weak form of all the function words so that the content words get highlighted.
| Word | Strong form | Weak form |
| has | /hæz/ | /həz/ |
| a | /eɪ/ | /ə/ |
| and | /ænd/ | /ən/ |
Listen out for it when you next hear a native speaker talk or radio. Remember, if you wish to talk like a native speaker, then mastering the use of weak forms is a must.