The rise and fall of English sentences Intermediate shadowing lesson
This VOA Learning English report is about how to improve your pronunciation with intonation, pauses and stress. A VOA voice reads the report clearly, and Marla Yoshida, an English teacher at the University of California, Irvine, speaks in her own natural way. The mix of a clear reading voice and natural speech makes it good shadowing practice for intermediate learners.
- Intermediate
- Audio
- 2:28
- 17 sentences
Free, no account needed. The app plays one sentence and waits for you to say it.
The sentences
Many English learners can improve their pronunciation by listening carefully to native English speakers and trying to match the up-and-down movement of their sentences.
That is the opinion of Marla Yoshida, an English-as-a-foreign-language teacher at the University of California, Irvine.
Yoshida wants English learners to look for details that are important to native speakers.
These details are not only sounds, she notes.
Native speakers also communicate by using pauses and by saying some words more forcefully than others.
As a result, native speakers might not understand an English learner even if the learner pronounces sound correctly.
Yoshida says that English learners often study pronunciation by listening and repeating something from a recording.
Yoshida says that English learners need to do more than listen and repeat in order to improve their pronunciation.
I've gradually gotten really interested in pronunciation because it's something that many students have trouble with, but they don't always get a lot of really good instruction in it.
They just have someone say, listen to this recording and repeat and now aren't you better?
No, you're not necessarily better.
It takes more than that.
The problem with listen and repeat, says Yoshida, is that when people repeat, they are often not trying to sound like the other person.
You think that when students are repeating after the teacher or whatever, they're trying to sound exactly like that person, but they're not.
The sounds that you hear go into your brain, and your brain interprets them or filters them through the sound system of your own language.
And what your brain ends up understanding is not everything, it's not what the speaker intended.
So you have to try to get past that filter and hear all of the details that are important to someone else.
Words and phrases
- pronunciation
- the way you say words
- native speakers
- people who learned a language as children
- pauses
- short stops when you speak
- forcefully
- with more strength or stress
- listen and repeat
- hear something, then say it again
- gradually
- slowly, over time
- interprets
- decides what something means
- filter
- something that lets only some things pass through
How to practise this clip
Listen for how each sentence goes up and down, where the speakers pause and which words they say more strongly, just as the report describes.
- Listen to a sentence before you read it.
- Say it right after, at the speaker's pace, with the same pauses.
- After the first round, hide the text and practise from the sound alone.
Source
VOA Learning English (Voice of America), public domain