The 2nd Edition of “Mastering The American Accent” Is Here

The second edition of “Mastering the American Accent” just became available for sale. You can buy it on Amazon or wherever books are sold.   It has a lot more practice exercises for syllable stress and word stress and sentence rhythm. These are very important skills to learn if you want to speak with a natural sounding accent.  Also, the audio is downloadable now.  (instead of CD’s).  There are three hours of additional audio.  All the vowel sounds of American English are covered in detail.

This combination book and audio instructional program is designed to diminish the accents of men and women who speak English as their second language. It will help them speak standard American English with clarity, confidence, and accuracy. Specific exercises concentrate on vowel sounds, problematic consonants such as V, W, TH, the American R, and the often confusing American T sound.

It teaches them to employ correct syllable stress, emphasize the correct words in a sentence for native sounding rhythm, speak with American intonation, link words for smoother speech flow, use common word contractions, and more. Additional topics that often confuse ESL students are also discussed and explained. They include distinguishing between casual and formal speech, homophones (for instance, they’re and there), recognizing words with silent letters (comb, receipt, and others), and avoiding embarrassing pronunciation mistakes, such as mixing up “beach” and “bitch.” Students are familiarized with many irregular English spelling rules and exceptions and are shown how such irregularities can contribute to pronunciation errors. A native language guide references problematic accent issues of 13 different language backgrounds. Correct lip and tongue positions for all sounds are discussed in detail. There is also a link to downloadable audio that uses male and female voices to coach correct American-style pronunciation.