One of my students (very advanced level) came to live in Germany from Poland or Russia about 8 years ago. She speaks both English German with a very strong accent.

 

I have no idea why her first English teachers did not help her with her pronunciation (I have only been her teacher since last summer):

She has now asked me for help because she realizes that the rest of the class and I hardly understand what she says (her accent is so very different from ours) and that in the Cambridge exam she  plans to take she risks losing a lot  of points.

 

She will have to work on her own, so what we need is a method, a website or just some other valuable advice from all ouf you out there who have had similar problems to deal with.

Thanks in advance

elderberry

I can�t offer any help, but I�ll say that this will be very difficult for her to do on her own, because correcting pronunciation requires lots of feedback. Maybe she can find a volunteer in the neighborhood who can help her. I once taught English to a Russian immigrant as a volunteer, and we had a wonderful time together.

 

Fortunately, Russian and German have the same sounds, except for some of the vowels, which are still fairly close. Russian has a few letters that German lacks, but that would only be a problem for a German learning Russian, not for this students. (For example, Russian has a letter that is transcribed in German as  schtsch - Yes, it�s a single letter in Russian).

 

If she has to do this on her own, I suggest lots of listening and repeating - television and radio are useful here. Recording herself as she repeats something she�s listening to should help.

 

These are just ideas off the top of my head. I don�t have experience in this area.

 

Bruce 

Hi Elderberrywine,

 

Listening to music can help a lot.

 

I used to use a book called "Pronunciation Pairs" which helps adults with phonics.

 

https://www.cambridge.org/be/cambridgeenglish/catalog/grammar-vocabulary-and-pronunciation/pronunciation-pairs-2nd-edition

 

She�s lucky to have a devloted teacher like you.  Good luck! 

 

Esther 

Thank you Esther and Bruce, helpful and quick to reply as always.

Maybe some other people have more advice to give? I�d like to suggest a couple of things to my student. 

elder

Actually, what helped me the most in learning to pronounce in my target language was getting frequent  feedback from a native speaker.

I hired a tutor and he recorded the words that I needed to practice. I listened to and repeated his recordings over and over.

Record and listen to herself--if her English is that good she will be able to her the difference herself (we are our own toughest critics).

 

I suggest she record herself (audio or video) reciting a text and then play it back, have her critique herself first and then add your own suggestions (be easy and only focus on the big problems first).  Then have her record, listen, critique herself a number of times on her own. Get back together after she has done this a few times and then do it one more time together. Next, give her a new text and repeat as necessary.

 

Cheers,

Douglas

 

Maybe she can try to listen to this as her routine activity for couple minutes everyday.

Slavic languages affect intonation, vowels and making voiced consonants voiceless at the end. As a speaker of Polish (and having some knowledge of Russian too) and my observations of students it seems that Russian would affect English stronger. For a short time fix you may ask her to try to pronounce /z/ at the end of any plural (that�s a simplified rule - the thing is that if the ending required would be a voiceless /s/ like in cats, she won�t be able to pronounce it differently. Another thing is pronouncing /d/ at the end od Past Simple regular verbs like in prepared ( same idea, and Slavs have tendency to making everything voiceless).

Intonationwise - Slavs have the tendency to rise intonation in questions, because their formation is not necessarily based on word order. Draw the student attention to the fact that it�s different in English, mainly falling. She may be quite surprised.

Work on vowels - all the methods our wonderful colleagues suggested are great, but minimal pairs will work here, too. 

 

One last question: what exam is she about to take? Guessing from the age it may be KEY for Schools, Preliminary for Schools or First for Schools. Depending on the level, pronunciation may not be that crucial of a factor - in KEY to be awarded a 5 the candidate " Is mostly intelligible, and has some control of phonological features at both utterance and word levels", in Preliminary "is intelligible. Intonation is generally appropriate. Sentence and word stress is generally accurately placed. Individual sounds are generally articulated clearly", for First "is intelligible, intonation is appropriate, sentence and word stress is accurately placed, individual sounds are articulated clearly".  So as you can see, her issues would become a bit of a problem in First. In other exams - there are words like "mostly" or "generally". So it may not be as bad as you think - but obviously I haven�t heard her speaking. And I am the examiner 

The best way in adults and children consists on listening practice. 

There are lost of series with british accent easy to understand (Dowton Abbey, Sherlock...) It would be useful to watch at least one opsiode per day. 

Furthermore, listening english songs (for example Beatles� ones) and try to sing them aloud can be another good practice. 

 

Best, Ana.