Working on pronunciation

Recently I’m quite concentrated on developing my pronunciation. I’ve been trying a few things which you can find interesting.

Today I’m going to tell you about the first I tried.

I used an interesting app prepared by British Council and called LearnEnglish Podcasts.

 

It took my attention because it’s about podcasts – as you know I use them a lot.

The app includes three Series with ten episodes each. Every podcast lasts 30 minutes, so we have plenty of audio materials to listen to.

But with the app you can not only download podcasts to listen to them, but also to see scripts synchronised with audio.

How can you use it to practise pronunciation?

First of course you can listen to the whole episode. Without looking at text. After that you can check your understanding by doing some exercise.

Then you can listen to it once again with reading the text. You can also try to read aloud with native speakers if you like. But first just listen to the native pronunciation.

The next step is to use pause button – Listen to a short part of the podcast and try to repeat it, recreating sounds as aright as it’s possible.

And the last step – read the text first and that listen to the recording to check if your pronunciation was OK.

The app has some other useful tools for listening and repeating sentences. You can set an appropriate recording speed. So the app is both for more or less advanced learners.

Although the podcasts can look a little bit too easy for advanced English speakers I thing it’s perfect for pronunciation  exercises.

It’s half of the year now.

I’ve been dealing with my project Englishfor365days for a while (if you want to know more about the idea of the project read this).

I’ve just checked and discovered that my first post was published on 29^th of November 2014. So it’s more than a half of the year now.

Of course I want to know if my ideas work. If my English is becoming better and better. And definitely it is.

First I can feel it – I know what you think, feelings don’t proof anything, but bear in mind that more advanced learners often can’t see that they really develop their language – it’s easier to notice it on the more basic levels. But I definitely can see the difference.

Second – I decided to check how my English is going and I repeated some of the tests I’d done at the beginning of the project. Of course I can’t be sure that results are true, but there must be something.

How many words do I know?

My results at the beginning:

After 4 months:

And after about 6 months: