美语发音视频教程Paul Gruber主讲全程15个系列教程文本[优质文档]

Pronunciation Workshop

—The American dream does not come to

those who fall out quick.

Session One

1. Consonant R

2. Consonant W

Hi, I’m your instructor Paul Gruber and welcome to the Pronunciation

Workshops---First Training Session.

I am very excited that you have taken this first step to improve your English pronunciation and I do hope that you would enjoy this program and receive great benefits from it. Before we begin I wanna make sure that you have downloaded and printed out the training manual which accompanies this course. If you have not yet done so, please do it soon because you’ll definitely need it.

Now you may be wondering how is it that I am going to help you change the way you speak. Well, basically, when you learned English as a second language, you kept many of the sounds and speech rules from your first language and you were continuing to use them when you speak English. This is what gives you an accent. You were using the sounds and speech rules from your native language instead of the sounds and speech rules of English. And you know why? Well, because when you learned English, nobody ever showed you what the sounds and speech rules of English were until now.

That’s why I’m coming . Because I am going to show you and train you on how t o use these sounds and speech rules correctly. Knowing in using these rules will help you reduce or possibly even eliminate your accent. Now throughout the program you’re often going to see me point to my mouth to show you how to produce a particular sound. I want you to pay close attention and try to copy exactly what it is I am doing. I would be showing you how to correctly form new sounds by changing the position of your tongue or changing the shape of your lips. These small changes are going to make ver y big changes in your speech. We’re going to practising and I recommend that you use the training manual and try to practise often. When you practise, I recommend that you start out speaking slowly out loud in a strong voice while exaggerating all the mouth movements. What would you be doing is retraining the muscles of your mouth in your tongue to move in new ways, which will produce a new pronunciation patterns. These new speech patterns will slowly and eventually involve into your own spontaneous fast speech, but it is

important that you start out going very slow. If you can pronunce words and sentences correctly speaking slowly, well, then you’ll have no problem in saying them fast.

I believe practising is important, but I do not believe it’s the only ke y towards success. Being aware of your errors. That’ s the key. Being aware and also recognizing mistakes when you hear them will probably be the most important factors towards your improvement.

Another thing I’d like you to keep in mind and I’m sure you m ay have noticed this already is that when most Americans speak you will notice that we seem to open our mouth a lot and there is a great amount of mouth movements. Watch my mouth when I say something like “Wow, was there really raining on Wednesday!” Did y ou see how my mouth seemed to move? It wasn’t with my lips flat. It wasn’t “Wow, was there really raining on Wednesday.” There was a lot of movements. My mouth opened wide, but also my whole mouth moved forward. Now I find many foreign speakers, maybe beca use of their language characteristics, they don’t move their mouths much. There is very little facial movement. Because of this, to an American listener, the words often sound mumble, making it very very difficult for an American listener to understand what it is you said. One way to be better understood immediately is to become more aware of your speech and to really start opening and moving your mouth.

I’d like to try to observe what I’m talking about. When you speak to native-borned Americans or watch TV or movies, notice how when Americans speak, generally our mouths really open big and our lips come forward. These movements have a lot to do with the sound of American English.

I also want to add that I’ll often be asking you to repeat words and sentences on these videos. Try to think as if we were both sitting in the same room and I am directly right in front of you. Listen carefully to the words and sounds that I give you. Listen carefully to my pronunciation and watch my mouth, then repeat the words bac k to me in your own voice with the techniques that I’m showing you as clearly as you can. Now at first you may feel a bit of foolish talking to your computer screen, but really you shouldn’t. Make believe you’re speaking directly to me. You’ll find this wi ll to be extremely helpful and effective.

During the course of this program, I will begin by addressing consonant sounds and then later on we’ll work with vowel sounds. Now vowel sounds, as you know, are A E I O and U, like ahh, ohh, eee, ehh, ihh and ooo. And consonant sounds are basically all the other letters’ sounds, like b, ch, s, t, f, g, sh, w and of course, there are many many more sounds.

The consonants that we are going to cover in this first session are the consonant R and the consonant W. Ok, ar e you ready? Here we go. Let’s get started. Let’s start with the American R.

R’s are everywhere. They’re probably the most commonly occurring consonant sound in English. One reason for this is that R’s affect vowel sounds, especially