The sound and style of American English A Course in Foreign Accent Reduction Dr.David Alan Stern INTRODUCTION I WANT TO REDUCE MY ACCENT. WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO FIRST? There are two basic skills you must learn right away if you want your speech to sound m ore American. First, you must learn the correct INTONATION . Intonation means the pitch changes and rhythms of a language or dialect. Once you begin Americanizing your intonation, native speakers will almost immediatlely become more comfortable with your speech and begin following your ideas much more easily. Second, you must change the way you move your moth muscles during the speech. Every language or dialect hs a unique way its speakers move their mouths. This leads to the language's special "sound" -- its very own resonance or voice tone. To reduce your accent, you must stop using the muscles as you did with your first language and substitute movements that produce this uniquely American tone. The first two-thirds of this audio contains exercises that teach you to produce American intonation and voice tone. Course 1 LESSON 1: THE MUSIC OF AMERICAN SPEECH IN THIS LESSON THE TAPE TEACHES YOU THE INTONATION (PITCH CHANGE) PATHERN WHICH IS CHARACTERISTIC OF WELL SPOKEN, STANDARD AMERICAN ENGLISH When it is spoken well, American speech has what I call a JUMP UP and STEP DOWN pattern of pitch change. that means that, inside each phrase or unit of thought, the pitch jumps up to a higher note on an early, important word. Then, it steps down a little bit on each syllable that follows within that unit. Most speakers of English as a second language do not use this JUMP UP and STEP DOWN pattern. People from some languages use little ...
