English Tap Pronunciation Course.

Before we delve too deeply into intonation and syllable stress, we should try to develop clarity with the basic sounds. There are consonant sounds and vowel sounds. We can practice saying single words to our partners and seeing if they are able to identify the word we said. It's difficult to listen and identify a single word without context, so this is practice only!! - In real life communication you should not try to communicate with single words or even very short sentences, because your listener needs context to help them understand.

Pronunciation is not just the way we make the sounds of words but how the tone and stress change and make patterns throughout words and sentences. Take the sentences :

1. "The high court has ruled that social workers weren't to blame for a child's death"
2. "The high court has ruled that social workers were to blame for a child's death"

as an example. Superficially there might seem to be only a very slight difference between these sentences. An inexperienced listener might be mistaken. Intonation is used to communicate meaning too and these two sentences should be read and intonated in quite different ways.

This section takes you through the basic sounds of English and onto more advanced aspects of pronunciation such as the stress patterns of long words and the intonation and phrasing of sentences. We should not only able to clearly pronounce words using the correct basic sounds but also know how to expess ourselves using stress and intonation. Stress is the way of making certain words or parts of words sound louder or more powerful. Intonation is the way our voice tones rise and fall during words and sentences. In many languages intonation is used to show the difference between a question and a statement. This is not usually the case in English, however intonation is still very important in communicating feeling and meaning. In spoken English we can change the meaning of a sentence only by changing the intonation and stress.