Improve your English Pronunciation: The Ultimate Guide for IELTS

Hello!

Now, today, we're going to do some IELTS speaking pronunciation practice.

And together we will take your understanding and practice of pronunciation

up to a whole new level.

Are you ready?

Then come with me.

Hi!

So my name is Keith.

I’m from the Keith Speaking Academy.

So today, we're going to be practicing the key pronunciation features,

that you need to master to get a Band 7, 8 or 9 in IELTS speaking.

I’m going to be looking at phonemes, word stress,

sentence stress, weak and strong forms,

connected speech and intonation.

Now first of all, why is pronunciation important?

Well, it is.

Because you probably know

pronunciation counts for 25% of your IELTS speaking mark, right?

Now have you ever looked at the IELTS speaking band descriptors?

"Uh…oh! Uh…sorry Keith, what, what, what are they?"

Well, if you don't know them, then you should go and find out.

You can go to my website there's a link below.

Go and look at the band descriptors, right?

Because this is where you can find out how the examiner evaluates you

and what they're looking for.

Now when we look at pronunciation,

it comes up all the time this phrase, pronunciation features.

A wide range of, a limited range of,

mixed control of pronunciation features.

What on earth are these pronunciation features, right?

That's what I need to know.

Well, in a word, here they are.

We've got word stress, connected speech, sentence stress,

phonemes, intonation, weak firms.

Weak firms, weak forms and strong forms.

In a nutshell,

these are probably the most important pronunciation features you need to know

and to master.

And this is exactly what we're going to look at today, one by law--

Come on!

So this is exactly what we're going to look at today.

We'll look at them one by one.

So you understand what they are and we'll start getting you to use them correctly.

So let's begin with phonemes.

So phonemes are individual sounds.

Including vowel sounds like,

“/ɪ/, / I:/, /ɑ/, /æ/”

and consonant sounds like,

“/p/, /b/, /s/”

Okay.

So these are your phonemes.

Basically, pronunciation exists on three different levels, right?

You've got your sounds, your words or your chunks and phrases, right?

So sounds like /k/, /ʌ/, /p/.

Words like cup, put them together.

/kʌp/, cup.

That's a word.

Phrases like “cup of tea”, right?

Putting all of these sounds together.

Basically there are 44 sounds in English.

That's it.

No more.

Everything you will ever, ever say is just made with 44 different sounds.

And here they are.

This is the phonemic chart and created by Adrian Underhill

and also thank you to Macmillan education, who copyright this.

And here you can see the different kinds of sounds, the 44 sounds in English.

The top half is just the vowel sounds, right?

And these are divided into the single vowels

and the diphthongs, which are sliding vowel sounds.

Then at the bottom we've got all the consonant sounds.

Now what's interesting with this is that the sounds go from the front of the mouth

to the back of the mouth, right?

And from the top of the mouth to the bottom of the mouth.

So you have at the start here for example,

“/Iː/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /uː/”

and similarly if you look at the consonants

“/P/ /b/, /t/ /d/, /ʈʃ/, /dʒ/, /k/ /g/”

going from the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth, right?

And from the top to the bottom.

Very interesting organization and really, really useful.

Now, if you want to practice these, there is a very, very simple mobile app

that you can use.

So this is an app by the British council.

It's called “Sounds right” and you can download it from their website.

There is a link down below.

And basically as you can see here, you can click on the different sounds.

For example, the vowel sounds and diphthongs to listen and try and repeat.

You can also click on the consonant sounds again and repeat.

And you also get example words with the different sounds.

So you can see the kind of words that are using those sounds too.

Now a really important thing about pronunciation is it's not mental.

It's not thinking and analytical.

It's not like grammar looking at patterns or vocabulary.

It's physical.

It's more like playing football or basketball, right?

Or dancing where you have to train your body to move in a certain way.

Same with pronunciation.

You have to train your mouth to move in a certain way.

So I think the key thing and the key message here, right, is that

you need to train.

I should say retrain your mouth, right?

Because you have learnt to pronounce and to speak your mother tongue

using the muscles, you need to pronounce the mother tongue, right?

Now the muscles being the lips, the tongue, the jaw

and the voice or the unvoiced sounds.

That's what you use to speak.

So it's very, very hard to speak another language correctly

with the correct pronunciation

because you're using the

familiar muscles and shapes that you've used your whole life.

What you really need to do is to retrain your whole mouth.

And I think it's really important when you're working on English learning

to make pronunciation a regular part of your practice.

And to retrain, practice training your mouth.

I’ll be showing you a few examples in a moment.

Have you ever tried something like a new sport?

You know, I mean I remember when I tried yoga for the first time, right.

And it was very difficult.

I remember watching the teacher, who would you know, she would do a perfect pose

and then I would have a go and be like,

nowhere near close.

But the teacher of course would help me and would say,

“Well, no, listen, when you're doing that, you need to stretch your arms.

Oh! Right. Okay like that.”

and she said, “No, put your shoulder down”, right?

And I go, “Oh! I see but it feels strange.”

and she goes, “Of course it feels strange. You're using new muscles in new ways.”

and it's exactly the same with pronunciation, right?

When I first learned Chinese,

I had headaches for days and days because I was trying to use the shape of my mouth

similar to the way Chinese people were.

And it's used in a very different way as with most languages, right?

So we need to think about retraining your mouth.

There are different ways of doing this and I think probably the worst way

is just to read stuff aloud.

Because you're just going to repeat the bad pronunciation, right?

Second way is you can listen to audio.

Now, that's okay.

Because at least you have the sound and you're trying to imitate the sound.

But you don't really know what's going on inside.

So you're kind of guessing

and you're probably repeating your mother tongue pronunciation.

Much better is video.

Which is why I’m a big fan of video, right?

Because whether it's teaching videos or Netflix or films

because you can see what's happening much more.

You can see the shape of the lips, the position of the jaw,

you can sometimes see the tongue.

So videos help a lot so long as you're paying attention

to what's going on here and comparing to yourself.

So using a mirror to look at your own voice is really important, right?

Your own mouth.

But best of all, is to have a coach or a teacher, who can actually say,

“Listen, you're doing this. You need to do this.”

and to show you and help you change the shape and use different muscles

to get the right sounds.

And then working and working on those sounds.

For example, let's take the word party, right?

And imagine a Spanish speaker for example.

Would probably say pa“r”ty.

Pa“r”ty.

And I would go, “No, not pa“r”ty. But /p aː t i/

Take the first sound.

You're saying pur, pur.

But it's a /p/.

In English the /p/ is aspirate.

There's like /h/.

There's like a voice or a wind coming out.

/p/

Look, the difference between pur, pur and /p/, /p/, right?

You literally, you're moving the paper.

So you need to practice the /p/ sound, right?

The second--

quite funny, right?

So if you see Spanish students going around the world going,

“Hello! My name is Pedro.”

you know that they're my students.

“Oh, hello! Yes, is your teacher Keith?”

“Yes, it is. How do you know?”

“I’m just guessing. Yeah.”

just for practice.

So that's the /p/.

But then there's the pa“r”ty.

R, r.

So look at the shape of the mouth ar.

And now look at the English shape.

/ɑː/, /ɑː/, /ɑː/

So you need to go from r -> /ɑː/.

/ɑː/

What happens, the lips become much more central, rounded and the jaw drops.

Pa“r”, pa“r”, pa“r”,

/p a:/, /p a:/, /p a:/

And then finally, the “t”,

the Spanish speaker would probably have a pa“r”ty.

Ty, ty.

But it’s a /t i/.

The mouth you can see is much, much closer.

So all together / ˈp aː t i /

Of course, the other difference is the Spanish speaker probably has the rur,

pa“r”ty, pa“r”ty.

They're doing this the sound if you take the shape of the front of the teeth

and their tongue is going par, arr, arr, par, par, par, pa“r”ty.

It's touching it.

In English, there is no “R”.

In British English, it's “Paa+tee”

we don't pronounce the “r” at all.

So that /aː/, ar, ar, the tongue must come back.

Paatee.

You don't even touch the teeth.

The tongue comes right back.

/ p aː t i /

So, by seeing the shape of the mouth and the jaw,

by understanding the position of the tongue,

a coach or a teacher can help show you how to change and to move.

And you can do this by looking and looking at videos.

And if you follow a pronunciation course,

you can learn lots and lots in this way.

I think if you're just working on your own, a good thing is once you've got the sound

to start to juggle and to practice.

So if you've learned the /p/, /p/,

practice /p/, Pi, pah, /paɪ/, Po.

Doesn't matter if they're real words.

You're just practicing the sounds, right?

/p/, Pi, /paɪ/

okay.

And if you want to throw in your piece of paper,

/p/, Pi, /paɪ/, Puh+ tay + toh.

You can, right?

Same with the /r/, /r/,

/kɑː/,

/maː/

/saː/,

/taː/,

/pa:/

Don't worry about the words existing.

Just practice those sounds.

It's the gym, right?

You're training your mouth to make these new sounds.

Just doing it once is not enough.

And just doing one sound is not enough.

You need to be putting sounds together

because that's what's really difficult, right?

Yep.

I can train you to say all 44 sounds.

But if you can't put them together, right,

/c/, /u/, /p/ = /kʌp/

/kʌp a tiː/

That's what you need to practice.

So be juggling all the time as you learn these sounds.

You can use the app I showed you before.

Practice those words and just make up your own, right?

Play.

Play with sounds.

That is what it really is all about.

Now coaches are not available for everybody but fortunately, nowadays online,

you can find teachers and coaches all over the internet.

And some of the best and most you know, trustworthy teachers that you can find

are out there on Cambly.

I’m a big fan of Cambly

and the work that they do and I would like to thank them again

for sponsoring this video.

If you don't know Cambly, basically they are a platform

where you can go and find native English-speaking teachers.

You can have online classes one-to-one with your teacher,

where you can practice your English.

You can practice IELTS questions and most importantly,

you can develop your pronunciation, get feedback

and help from a native speaker to really nail your pronunciation.

So that you can get that high score in IELTS speaking.

The platform does have also online courses that you can follow,

including some IELTS courses.

Lots of ideas to help you get materials to study

and to practice with your live teacher when you go on the platform with Cambly.

If you join Cambly have given us and you a code

to get a discount on all of their packages.

Just use the code you can see up here:

“keith-disc”

for discount.

And with that code

just put it in and you'll get the discount, if you're a first time user that is.

So Cambly, great platform, great opportunity to practice your pronunciation.

Go and check them out.

Right now let's get back to the content.

There is another app if you're interested on practicing,

getting the individual sounds.

These are-- it's not an app. Sorry.

It's a playlist on YouTube by the “BBC learn English videos”.

They go through all sounds and there's a--

you can see the woman who is making the vow, the mouth shapes.

It's really a big help.

It's well worth investing a few days going all the way through it, right.

Next, word stress.

Now words are made up of different syllables as you may know.

A syllable is basically a unit of pronunciation

that is well, it's a vowel sound,

that may or may not have a consonant before or after it.

Okay?

For example the word two, right?

Has one syllable, Two.

Twenty, twenty has two syllables.

Tomorrow, tomorrow has three syllables, right?

Now it's very important to stress the correct syllable.

Of course, if there's just one syllable like hat, it's easy.

But when you have more than one syllable like tomorrow,

to, mo, rrow, which one do you stress?

To-mo-rrow in that case, you stress the second one, right?

Take for example po-ta-to,

/pə - teɪ - təʊ/, right?

We stress the second.

And notice what happens to the first sound.

Po becomes /pə/

because when you stress something, you have to unstress the sound next to it.

Usually the sound before but not always.

So instead of po-ta-to, it's /pə - teɪ - təʊ/,

/pə - teɪ - təʊ/

Now if we put the stress in the wrong place in a word,

it can lead to confusion, right?

Let's put this to the test.

I want you to write down these words, right, to see if you know what I’m saying.

So go and get a pencil or a pen

or you can note it on your iPhone or your android phone.

Listen carefully and tell me the word I’m telling you. Okay?

Listen carefully.

Fo-r-get,

fo-r-get.

Satur-day,

Satur-day

To-mato,

to-mato

Did you get them?

Did you understand the words?

Because I was putting the stress in the wrong place and if I change it,

you might understand.

So the first one should have been for-get, right?

Not fo-r-get.

For-get.

Second one was not Satur-day it should have been Sa-turday

stress on the first syllable, Sa-turday.

The last one to-mato.

What is a to-mato?

Oh! You mean a to-ma-to, to-ma-to.

So can you see, it's so important to get the stress right in the word

or you're gonna confuse people.

I mean imagine, right.

If you walk into a green grocers in England,

a green grocer sells fruit and vegetable, right?

And imagine you walk in and go,

“Hello! I’d like a kilo of to-matoes please.”

and the shopkeeper goes,

“A kilo of what?”

“To-matoes”

“I’m sorry, we don't have any to-matoes here.”

“No, no, really the red juicy ones.”

“No, no, no to-matoes here. Sorry!”

“Oh! Come on. You-- everybody has to-matoes in the salad.”

“oh god! What on earth is this person talking about? We don't have any. I’m sorry!”

“Oh! Okay. Then well, just give me some po-tatoes.”

po-tatoes.

Po-ta-toes.

Great.

So be careful next time when you look at your word stress.

How do you get it right?

Well, you look in the dictionary

and it tells you which is the word, which is the syllable to stress.

And when you're making notes of words, right,

always make a note of the stress, the word stress.

You can do that by either just underlining, like this, right?

For<u>get</u>, <u>Sa</u>turday.

Some people just write the stress in capital letters.

You can write a little circle on top of the stressed syllable.

Whichever works.

But just make a note, right?

Now as I said before, notice it's important to unstress, when you stress.

So instead of saying for-get because you're stressing get,

it's /fə/, /fə - get/

that's how you make it work.

/fə - get/

Sa-tur becomes /sæ - tə/

/tə/

/sæ - tə - deɪ/

/sæ - tə - deɪ/

To-ma-to becomes /tə’/ not too,

but /tə/

/tə’ – ma: təʊ /

Very often the unstressed syllable becomes the Schwa sound.

The /ə/

It's the most common sound in English,

/ə/

Okay.

So that's it.

Let's have a look at some of the very, very common IELTS words,

you need to pronounce correctly.

How do you say these words?

Right. Okay.

So you tell me is this right or wrong?

Pho-tography.

It's wrong, right?

It should be pho-to-graphy.

Stress on the top,

/ fəˈtɑːɡrəfi /

The second one.

The second one, right or wrong?

E-co-nomics, e-co-nomics.

It should be eco-no-mics,

eco-no-mics.

Not e-co-nomics,

Right?

/ ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks /

If I say e-co-nomist, that's correct.

And so I think you're saying e-co-nomist.

So notice, these words of the same family, often sometimes,

the stress, the word stress changes whether it's a noun an adjective or a verb.

So be careful with these kinds of words.

There is another really important group of words,

where a word can be both a noun and a verb.

Like, re-cord or rec-ord.

If the stress falls on the first syllable, it's going to be the noun: re-cord.

If it falls on the second, it's going to be a verb: rec-ord, rec-ord. Okay?

So when you see words like these below, trans-port,

the stress on the first is when it's a noun.

If you say tran-sport, tran-sport, then it becomes a verb, right?

The same with im-port.

We have a lot of im-ports, im-ports.

That's the noun.

But if you put it on the second im-port,

im-port, then it's a verb.

I’m going to im-port some cheese or some tomatoes from Spain.

So that's a really good rule of thumb, right?

A rule of thumb is a general rule.

If it's a noun, stress the first syllable.

If it's a verb, stress the second syllable.

Simple easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.

Let's move on.

Right.

Next up sentence stress.

Sentence stress is where we decide which word to stress in a sentence,

in order to express our meaning

or maybe to express emphasis as well, right? Now,

I don't know if you've ever been to a casino, right?

In the casino, you can play blackjack, craps

that you can play the penny slot machines.

Casinos you know, 90% of people who gamble,

lose their money in the casino.

In fact, there's only one person who wins and that's the casino.

So be very careful if you go there.

But imagine somebody---

imagine I went to the casino, I gambled and I lost all my money, right?

I could say, “I lost all my money.”

now if somebody asked me,

“How much did you lose?”

I say,

“I lost all my money”

If somebody says,

“Whose money did you lose?”

“I lost all my money”

and if they say,

“What did you lose Keith?”

“I lost all my money”

Can you hear, that the word is stressed is different each time,

to give a slightly different meaning.

So it's really important to look at this and to understand how we use it.

In other languages, you may use words to emphasize

but we use stress to emphasize.

It's also worth knowing that English tends to be, not always,

but tends to be a stress-timed language,

rather than a syllable-timed language.

So some languages are that the stress falls every syllable, right?

In English, normally, the stress falls at the same time, not on every syllable.

You'll notice if you listen to my videos, I often say …….

The stress always coming at the same time.

Let me show you very, very three simple sentences, right.

Listen, he lives in a big gold house.

He lives in a big gold house.

He lives in a lovely old house.

He's been living in a lovely old house.

Can you see the stress is the same every time?

But there's lots more syllables.

But we just squeeze the syllables in

and this is the secret to English sentence stress, right?

If you don't stress every syllable,

you stress the most important words in the sentence.

He's been living in a lovely old house.

Living lovely house, those are the key words, right?

And in the same way, do you remember with the to-ma-to, right?

The to-ma-to in order to stress the “ma”,

we unstress the to, ta,

to-ma-to.

It's the same with sentence stress.

The words that we don't stress, are often contracted.

They become weak.

We tell, we say.

So for example, this sentence.

I go to work at 9.00 a.m.

Now, many speakers who have a syllable stressed language would say,

“I go to work at 9.00 a.m.”

But in English, it's I go to work, at 9.00 a.m.

I go to work.

We stress the “go” and the “work”

and so the to becomes /tə/

You almost swallow it.

Becomes /tə/

I go to work /ət/, at becomes /ət/

at /ət/

/ət/ 9.00 a.m.

I go to work /ət/ 9.00 a.m.

What time do you go to work?

I go to work /ət/ 9.00 a.m.

Where do you go?

I go to work /ət/ 9.00 a.m.

See?

Sentence stress.

Really important.

That's a quick overview.

Let's move on.

Okay.

I’m going to move on now and talk about weak and strong forms.

And this is very closely connected actually to the sentence stress.

Do you remember I said in a sentence you stress certain words

and therefore you unstress the others.

So when you unstress a word, we use what we call the “weak” form.

So the words that we unstress normally, are not the important words, right?

So we're not talking about nouns, adjectives and verbs.

We're talking about the other smaller words,

that kind of connect your sentences.

So these are the main groups of words, right?

Where you have weak and a strong form.

So verbs like to be, to have,

can, would, should, will.

Prepositions like to, at, for, from.

Conjunctions like and, but, than.

Pronouns like you, your, he, she, her, him and so on.

So all of these words have a weak form and a strong form, right?

For example, to, t o, the strong form is /tuː/

the weak form is /tə/

/tuː//tə/

And I’m often amazed at how many students don't know

about the weak and the strong forms.

And yet, it is the crux of English pronunciation.

It's so important, right?

So let's take some examples to make this clear for you.

Remember, the sentence before I go to work at 9.00 a.m. right?

So we stress go and work.

So I go /tə/ work,

not /tuː/ but /tə/

work and not at but /ət/

/ət/, /ət/

I go to work /ət/ 9.00 a.m. right?

You've got it all.

You've got the weak forms, the stress and the …..

I go to work /ət/ 9.00 a.m.

I’ll give you some more examples.

Let's take /wɒz/ /wəz/

/wɒz/ /wəz/

I /wɒz/, I /wəz/

I /wɒz/, I /wəz/

/ fɔː/, /fə/

/ fɔː/ strong, /fə/ weak.

/tuː/ strong, /tə/ weak.

So let's have a look at this sentence, right.

I was waiting for the bus to come.

Which words do you think we will stress?

That's right.

Yes, waiting, bus, come.

They're the key words.

The verb, the noun, those are they carry the main meeting.

The main meeting.

The main meaning.

The other words that we unstress therefore, and use the weak form are

yeah.

/wəz/, /fə/, /tə/

So the sentence is I was waiting for the bus to come,

okay?

Break it down.

I /wəz/ waiting /fə/ the bus /tə/come.

All together I was waiting for the bus to come.

Can you hear that?

Weak and strong forms.

Again, we could look at all of the words and go through them

but that's a complete pronunciation course.

This is just to give you an introduction.

So you're aware and you can start listening out for it.

I think it's really good if you can watch videos with subtitles

or the transcript like the “Ted-Ed”

or the “Ted Talks” are great because you can see the transcript.

So you can hear and be really listening for these words and

picking out if you want to read.

“Oh! That's where they're reducing. They're using the weak form.”

once you start listening out, you'll start waking up to the real sounds of English.

And then once you can hear it, you can also start pronouncing it

and working on producing it.

Okay.

Great.

Let's move on.

Right.

Now, next up is connected speech.

Do you remember we talked about three levels of pronunciation, right?

We had the sounds level, kind of the phonemes,

the consonant and vowel sounds.

We then had the word level and we looked at word stress,

changing the stress on the syllable.

And then the third level is kind of the phrase or the chunk

or the sentence level.

So we looked at sentence stress.

And another key part of that third level is connected speech.

Many languages don't have this.

Some do it to a different degree to English.

But in English it's very common.

We use it a lot.

We don't always have to do it.

But it's really good for use to start doing

at least a little bit of connected speech, if you're not doing any.

So basically, this is where we have two words together.

And we link the sounds between the words.

So typically, if a word ends in a consonant sound

and the next word begins with a vowel sound,

then we'll connect them, right?

For example, wake,

it ends in a /k/, /k/

/weɪk/ up.

The next word up, /ʌ/, /ʌ/

is a vowel sound.

So instead of saying wake up,

we say wake-up.

The /k/ and the /ʌ/ come together.

Almost like way-cup, way-cup,

wake-up.

They're connected.

Can you hear the difference between I wake up and I wake-up?

You're making a chunk.

It's so much easier to pronounce.

And it sounds so much more natural. Okay?

Other common examples we may see,

first of all,

first /t/, /t/

will link to the /ɔː/

and the of, /v/, /v/

Remember o, f is /əv/ with a /v/

/v/+/ɔːl/ = /vɔːl/

/vɔːl/.

Watch the mouth /vɔːl/

Remember, first-of-all.

First-of-all.

So there's a /tvɔːl/.

The best way to do this is to go backwards.

Repeat with me.

/vɔːl/,

/tvɔːl/

First-of-all.

First-of-all.

A bit strange I know.

But that is linking.

Another example on top of that.

Same thing.

Top of, top-of.

Top-of

On top-of that

On top-of that

On top-of that

On top-of that

So the most common occurrence is when you know,

you have a word finishing in a consonant sound

and the next one begins with a vowel,

you can connect but you don't have to.

Again, I think it's really good practice for you to start listening out for this.

Because once you start hearing it, it'll become crystal clear.

It's extremely common in phrasal verbs, right?

Things like take out, take-out

Give-up

Take-on

Put-away.

Because most prepositions begin with a vowel, right?

Pu-taway, taway.

And the way to practice is separate that final consonant and put it together

with the second word.

Pu-taway

Ta-kaway

Ta-koff

Ta-koff

Ta-koff your coat.

Pu-taway your shoes.

Give-away your money.

Why not?

So very nice.

That's connected speech.

Now another very quick thing that you'll notice with connected speech

it's not just linking,

there are also other strange and magical things happening.

We have letters or sounds that disappear.

Letters and words that appear out of nowhere.

All sorts of things happen, which I won't go into much detail.

But let me just tell you one, where a sound disappears, right?

And it's a very common one because it's one, that a lot of students get wrong.

And it's the word mus"t" that finishes in a “t”, right?

Must.

So if we say, I mus“t” go,

nobody speaks like that, right?

I mus“t” go.

It's very, very strange.

That “t” sound drops and disappears.

So it's actually, I mus go.

There is no “t”.

I mus go.

He mus pay.

He mus pay, right?

Forget the “t”.

It drops.

So if you've got must, and the next word begins with

most consonant sounds, not all of them.

Then things like I mus go, he mus pay, I mus listen more

that “t” disappears.

Very good one to learn because it's such a common modal verb.

There are many more but not for today.

Let's move on.

Right.

Last, but not least intonation.

Now this is one of the most challenging parts of pronunciation.

And it's all about that third level

we talked about, about chunk phrase sentence level.

Intonation is basically the change in pitch or tone

across a sentence to give meaning.

In many languages, you have different tones

for different words and it changes the meaning of the word, right?

For example in Chinese, you have

má, mā, má

right?

And others.

And it changes the meaning of the word.

In English,

the tone or the pitch changes on a word

but it affects the meaning of the whole phrase or the whole sentence.

That's the important thing, right?

So we have, I guess three basic kind of pitches.

We've got rising Mmh, Mmh.

Falling Mmm, Mmm.

Falling-rising Mmm-Mmh

Mmm-Mmh.

And you can also have actually rising-falling Mmh-Mmm.

There are different kinds, right?

I guess the main thing we're going to focus on is how these can be used

to change the meaning of the phrase.

There are no strict rules for this, right?

And that's what makes it really difficult.

I’m going to give you some rules of thumb.

Thumb, a rule of thumb is a general guideline

for certain ways of using them.

But really it comes from practice, okay.

Let me begin with a very, very simple example, right?

Imagine I've been to the casino.

“What, again?” Yeah.

And I get home and I’ve lost all my money, right?

And I tell my Mrs. my wife,

“You know, I’m really sorry but I’ve lost all my money. All our money”

and she might say,

“Well, that's great.”

I don't think she's going to say,

“Well that's great!”

because “Well, that's great!”

rising means that it's great!, it's very, very good.

But the same words “well, that's great”

falling intonation.

Means it's terrible.

Very, very bad.

So that intonation is key on expressing the meaning.

Let's look at some rules of thumb.

First of all, questions.

So generally, we've got two kinds of questions.

We've got questions which are open like, what, where, why, who.

Those open questions have normally a falling intonation, right?

What time are you coming?

Who are you going with?

Where are you going?

What are you doing?

Usually those questions have a falling intonation.

The close questions kind of yes/no answer questions

normally have a rising intonation.

Are you coming?

Are you sure?

Do you want some?

Do you have time?

Can you hear that?

Are you coming?

Do you want some?

It's rising.

So those kind of questions, right, normally it's rising.

What else we've got?

Lists.

Sometimes in IELTS you might be giving a list of things.

And the very common intonation pattern is

rising, rising, falling on the last one of the list, right?

Not always.

And you don't have to do this but it is a common recognized pattern, right?

Do you like animals?

Yeah, sure.

I like elephants, tigers and monkeys.

Right?

I like elephants, tigers and monkeys.

Do you like animals?

Right.

Exactly, yes.

Vegetables.

I like carrots, bananas that's not a vegetable.

I like carrots, potatoes and tomatoes.

Some of you are saying,

“Keith, tomatoes are fruit.” I know, but not to worry.

This is a test of English.

Not a test of nutrition.

So lists, right?

That's very common to have that.

The other one is conditionals.

So very often conditionals, the first part goes up

and the second part goes down, right?

If you win, you will get a prize.

If you win, you will get a prize.

So notice the intonation happens on the last word.

But it's affecting the whole sentence.

Win, prize.

If you win, you'll get a prize.

If I were rich, I’d be very happy.

Okay?

So this is quite common with many, many conditional sentences.

Again, just to be clear, this is not a rule that you have to follow.

Intonation is super flexible.

It's just a rule of thumb.

It's a guideline of common ways intonation is used.

Right.

As always,

there's not enough time to give you more detail.

But I hope I’ve given you a flavour of the importance of pronunciation

and really what the pronunciation features are,

you need to be working on to get that Band 7 in IELTS speaking.

It takes a lot of practice, it takes a lot of time

and it's all about training your mouth, training your muscles, your lips,

your tongue, your jaw

and the voice and unvoiced, which we haven't talked much about.

Maybe I should do a series.

Maybe I should make a course on pronunciation.

I don't know.

But I hope this is going to give you incentive and motivation

to start discovering more.

Go and have a look at the apps I’ve shared with you today.

And get cracking.

Start levelling up your pronunciation today.

Okay?

All of this is based on a British model and that's because I’m British.

It's perfectly fine to use an American model.

If you're a teacher's American of course or Canadian or Australian,

you're going to be adopting slightly different sounds.

Do remember that accent is not important in IELTS speaking, right?

And it's not a British test.

It's international English.

It includes American English, Australian English, right?

All kinds of Englishes from around the world,

as you'll know when you've done your listening practice.

And the same for speaking.

It doesn't matter about your accent, so long as

your pronunciation is clear and you have control of these pronunciation features.

And you can now go and tell your friends,

“I know what the pronunciation features are. Look! Keith has told us”

Go and share the good news.

As always, I’d like to thank our sponsors for today's video, that's Cambly.

Cambly is an online teaching platform,

where you can find a native English-speaking teacher

to help you with you--

well, with your pronunciation.

What a great opportunity.

So go and check them out.

You can get a discount if you use the code,

the code here “keith-disc”

and with that, you'll get a discount on their offers

for any or all of their packages.

Take advantage.

Go and check it out.

Thank you very much Cambly!

I hope you've enjoyed this video.

Please do subscribe.

Turn on the notifications.

Share it with your friends.

And keep practicing.

I can't wait to see you soon, if I haven't lost all my money down at the casino.

Don't worry, I don't gamble.

On a final closing note,

I haven't done a pronunciation course but I have done a fluency course

and the fluency course focuses a lot on intonation and pronunciation, actually.

So if you want to go and check it out, it's up here,

it's fluency for IELTS speaking.

The links are down below.

There is a discount on at the moment.

Go and check it out.

It might be right for you.

Go and see.

Take care my friends!

All the best now.

Bye-bye!