Description:

Students learn and practice specific difficult sounds, proper mouth position, stress, intonation, and rhythm, and how to assess and improve their own pronunciation. Prerequisite: Acceptance to the ELI program.

Outcomes:

After completing this class, students should be able to:

• Understand and better produce American English phonemes
• Vowels, long and short, schwa
• Diphthongs,
• Consonants
• Consonant clusters
• Recognize, distinguish and produce minimal pairs (s/sh/ t/th, b/p, r/l)
• Know the position of the tongue, mouth, and lips for each of the sounds above
• Recognize and better produce correct intonation and stress in sentence level conversation.
• Recognize the pronunciation difficulties that he/she and other speakers of his/her native language have in pronouncing English AND do exercises to overcome these difficulties and reduce the difference between his/her pronunciation and that of native speakers.
• Recognize basic differences in American dialects (New England, southern, Standard).
• Self assess his/her English language utterances for volume, intonation, stress, and pronunciation and take steps to improve these.