Material Detail

This course will be beneficial if you wish to learn how to communicate with the sounds and music of American English. The purpose is not to increase your vocabulary, nor to improve your grammar, but to deal with the sounds of the words that you speak. Your message is of primary importance, but it may not be understood if your pronunciation is imprecise, inconsistent, or regional. This course is particularly useful for actors or for others who need to speak to diverse audiences, such as when giving a business presentation.

You will have the flexibility of time to experience, at your own pace, aural and visual aspects of a sound. Within the course, students are assessed on their ability to recognize each sound in a variety of contexts and are given feedback on their particular answers.

You will learn to:

• Articulate sounds and words using the dialect of Standard American English.
• Listen and think in terms of symbols for sounds, using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
• Use the International Phonetic Alphabet to transcribe from the Roman alphabet into the forty-four sounds of Standard American Dialect and vice versa.
• Analyze texts for phrasing, operative words, intonational patterns, degrees of stress.
• Achieve a proper use of weak forms for certain parts of speech in the English Language, making your speech clear and efficient.