How to improve your pronunciation and your IELTS Speaking score?

Pronunciation is of utmost importance when it comes to being a top scorer in IELTS Speaking. One of the four assessment criteria for the IELTS Speaking assessment. Unless you pronounce words accurately, you are highly likely to lose 25% marks for that.

That’s why focusing on learning and producing accurate pronunciation is essential. Your entire speech will sound even more impressive as well when you utter them with proper pronunciation. However, wrong pronunciation can convey the wrong meaning to the examiner.

For example, if you pronounce the word “beach” in a short sound, it will look like “bitch”, which is quite the opposite of what you are trying to mean. So, good pronunciation is a key element of smart speaking. This blog enlists the top 5 tips for improving your pronunciation.

1. Listen to the authentic speech

Being born in a non-native country, we are not thoroughly exposed to listening to authentic English speeches. When you make a habit of watching and listening to authentic sounds, you will be constantly learning the actual sounds subconsciously.

Likewise, your ears will be trained to utter the correct sounds gradually. What’s even more important is that this habit will help you diametrically pinpoint where your shortcomings are in pronunciation. Learning authentic speech will allow you to learn how native speakers utter words appropriately.

2. Get to know the phonemic chart

This is an integral part of building your pronunciation basics from the root level. Once you learn pronunciations only through watching videos or listening to songs or speeches, the possibility of making your pronunciation foundation stronger from the core would seem bleak.

This is because you are not learning the pronunciation rules step by step right from the beginning. Rather this sounds like a hypothetical way of learning pronunciations.

So, having a good grasp of the phonemic chart is an incredible way to strengthen your pronunciation skills. If you look at the phonemic chart above, you’ll see that there are vowel sounds, there are consonant sounds and there are also diphthongs in the chart.

Each of them has a different sound. Some of them have shorter sounds, some of them have longer sounds, and others have a distinctive sound that is not available in Bengali letters, in some cases.

3. Use a dictionary

There are thousands of vocabularies in English. Listening to certain videos or speeches, therefore, will not be able to teach you the pronunciations of all the words at a time. There will be a time when you’ll be confused with some words. You cannot help looking them up in the dictionary for their correct pronunciations.

If you have a clear conception of the phonemic chart as shown in tip no 2, you would be able to check out the pronunciation of any word from the dictionaries. You can check the sound of any particular word from the Oxford learners dictionary, Collins online dictionary, and any Merriam Webster. Nevertheless, unless you have a sound idea about the phonemic chart, you are likely to struggle to understand the sounds from the written transcription. But in order to check the pronunciations of a particular word, this is the best way for anyone.

Most notably, ‘Learn English Sounds Right’ developed by British Council can be a good app that can help you take your pronunciation skills to the next level. This app includes a lot of things from the individual sounds of vowel sounds and consonant sounds to the separate sounds of diphthongs. So, this could be one of the helpful tools for you.

4. Do some exercise with a friend or someone else.

If you learn numerous things about pronunciation but don’t apply them in conversations, your skills will be fossilized. That is why you need to have a speaking partner to practice speaking with so that you can implement what you have learned about pronunciation. On top of that doing exercise cannot alone drive up your pronunciation skills. The way you practice is what matters the most in terms of ensuring your progress.

What’s usually an effective way? Well, there are certainly multiple ways you can follow. One of them could be speaking regularly with another buddy, and recording your conversations to detect your pronunciation weaknesses. Let someone else listen to your recordings and offer feedback from him on your speaking. Afterward, correct your mistakes accordingly.

Imagine that you are having difficulty pronouncing a particular word or sound, you can check its pronunciation from the dictionary or notice the pronunciation of that particular word from native speakers. Thus, you can rectify your mistakes and clear your confusion.

5. Learn when to stress words and sounds

Needless to say, English is a language that is not flat like Bengali. It contains a lot of variations. If you look closely at the speeches of native speakers, you’ll figure out that they speak sometimes with rising tones and other times with falling tones. Look at the example below.

The fish listened intently to what the frogs had to say. 

Here, the bold words will be stressed because they are the content words in the sentence. On the other hand, the words that are not bold in the example above will not be stressed because they are function words. What are the content words by the way?

Content words are verbs, adverbs, nouns, and adjectives. Function words are, however, pronouns, conjunctions, articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs like have, be, and do. You can find a wealth of resources about pronunciation in the app mentioned above and at BBC Learning English.

So, there are various features of pronunciation that you have to master to better your pronunciation like stress (which words and syllables are having more weight when are speaking them in a sentence, intonation (how the tone of voice changes in a sentence, going up or down) and connected speech (how words can sound different when they are joined in a natural speech).

All these components together contribute to good pronunciation. However, do not confuse pronunciations with accents. You don’t have to sound like a British or American in your speaking to get even a band 9. IELTS Speaking band score only looks for good pronunciation, not any particular accents. Good pronunciation refers to being understood, and not sounding like you were born in the UK or the USA.