What's up everyone! Today we're talking all about fluency and I have a question for you:
is bad pronunciation killing your fluency? Imagine being fluent in English as a checkbox list and
in a rather simplistic way we need to check the boxes of vocabulary so you can use a wide variety
of words that are appropriate in that situation and grammar, you can organize your ideas into
sentences using the correct form tense and so on. But when it comes to developing advanced fluency
you feel that your pronunciation is holding you back. If something holds you back it stops you
from developing or doing as well as you should. In this lesson I'm going to explain what fluency is
and the role that pronunciation has in it. We'll also take a look at whether or not accent matters.
Then we'll break down pronunciation into the three key parts that are important for you to add oral
fluency into your speech. But before we get into it I want to let you know that we are here to
guide you beyond the classroom to live and learn and speak English in the real world. So be sure to
hit that subscribe button and the bell down below so that you don't miss any of our new lessons.
So first of all what do we mean by fluency? Oral fluency is the ability to speak a foreign language
easily and effectively combined with the ability to effortlessly understand others
who use this spoken language. Some academics regard fluency as smooth rapid effortless use
of language and natural language use or language that is spoken easily and without many pauses.
Now when we talk about smoothness of speech and natural use of language we are referring
to pronunciation and of course this is a key part of fluency. Fluent speakers are easily understood
because they can clearly produce the individual and joined sounds of English. So they've mastered
rhythm, intonation, linking and stress. So they sound natural when they speak now you
can be fluent in English and have an accent. So over on our Learn English with TV Series Channel
we actually investigated the accents of Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone and Sofia Vergara who
have an excellent level of English but they do have an accent. So if you haven't watched those
lessons I highly recommend you check them out. I'll link them down in the description box below.
Essentially pronunciation is the way that we say words and sentences.
But let's actually go a little deeper there are three key aspects of pronunciation that you need
to master if you want to become a fluent English speaker. These are rhythm, intonation and stress.
Now chances are you've probably acquired these to some degree. You've probably imitated certain
characteristics of the way that native speakers speak and so you generally have the right rhythm,
intonation and stress. However if you really want to master these areas you need to understand
certain aspects of them. So what is rhythm? This is the speed and cadence of how you say a
sentence. So as I mentioned before we don't say each word at the same speed. That would sound
very boring and very robotic. Now the rhythm of English might be different to the rhythm of
your native language, so it's really important to understand the unique rhythm of English.
Now think of rhythm as syllables and a beat. Look at this sentence.
Generally we stress one or two syllables in content words. So these are the words
that carry the meaning of our sentence. So here it would be workers going strike
tomorrow. We don't stress syllables in function words which in this example are
the are and on. So these are the little words that construct the grammar of our sentence.
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this 41 week course will take you on a Real-life adventure of the English language each week
exploring a different topic connected to our goal to help you understand and use real native English
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So if the rhythm is made up of beats, intonation is the melody of the language. In fact this is
often described as the music of English. This refers to the pitch patterns that a
speaker uses when communicating in English and there are three patterns of intonation.
Lastly the other key aspect is stress. So this is saying a syllable or part of a word more strongly
and can be at word level. This can also change the meaning of a word. For example present is a noun
and present is a verb. So in a sentence you could say she is present at the conference
or she'll present at the conference. At sentence level stress is important for
creating meaning and communicating what you intend to say and not something else.
This is known as contrastive stress. Another aspect of pronunciation that is
essential for fluency is connected speech. Now imagine connected speech as all the things that
I've just spoken about coming together. When we talk about the rhythm of English and how some
words are unstressed what we mean is that those weak syllables are going to start to be reduced
and linked to other words so your speech will become a lot more natural and will flow more.
So we've come to the end of our lesson but do remember that the three key areas of pronunciation
are rhythm, intonation and stress and ultimately connected speech which ties everything together.
So I hope pronunciation won't hold you back any longer and you can start working on these patterns
to improve. But now it's time to go beyond the classroom and live your English. Aww yeah!
So rudimentary is another way of saying basic or not so developed. So
if you were to describe someone's English in this way we would tend to think of someone with
maybe more of a strong or thick accent. Now what we mean by having a thick or strong accent
is someone that is speaking English with more of a tone and the sound of their.