Personal pronunciation profile

Note to the reader : You will find recordings of the work we have done during the semester on the USB key I gave you. Hope it will help you in evaluate the progression of my accent.

I must admit that I don’t often get the occasion to hear myself speaking English. I know that my accent is understandable and even quite good but I would like to improve it because I am going to work in communications, which means that I need to have a really good accent in order to share my ideas in the best way.

At the beginning of the semester, we had to do several recoridngs in order to assess our level of pronunciation and to focus on the difficulties we had. When I listened to the recordings of Part 1 and 2, I thought that my way to read was not fluent. I tendeq to separate the syllables too much which gave the impression that I didn't understand what I was reading. The words were not fully connected to each other which could almost change the meaning of a sentence sometimes. For example, when I read the sentence “Although they may be able to read and write very well, they often find that they can’t understand what people say to them”, the meaning is not really clear because I separate “Although” from the rest of the sentence.

But reading a text and talking with somebody are completely different exercises. They don't require the same abilities and we don't need to take care of the same issues. I have the feeling that my pronunciation is quite good but that my tone is not good. I tend to use the french tone while I am speaking english which emphasizes the fact that I sound like a foreigner. This last point was told to me by a native speaker. I tend to put the emphasis at the same place as I would do it if I was speaking french. So I guess, this is one of my biggest jobs when it comes to improving my level of pronunciation.

That point of view of my pronunciation was mainly made by listening to recordings I had to do for class and by examinating the comments made by the professor on my assignments and oral presentations. Here are some of the work I have done through the semester with the comments on it. They really helped me to realize some of my difficulties and I tried to face it in the glossary part.

From those comments on my work and also thanks to the conversations I had with native speakers, I could realize that the five main problems that I am facing with my pronunciation are :
- on certain words, I tend to avoid pronuncing certain consonants and say the word in an approximative way.
- I need to improve my pronunciation of diphtongues.
- The rythm of my sentences is not very good when I am reading.
- Sometimes, the linking between my words is not always good and I need to repeat my sentence to the person I am talking with.
- I tend to put the emphasis on the wrong syllables.