Introduction
Hi, I’m Christine Dunbar and this is my 6-Week American Accent Course. I’m really excited about this course, because it has everything you need to make a positive change in your speech. If you’ve come this far, you are clearly motivated to improve your personal and professional communication. You might find that your accent is getting in the way of being understood, or you might be looking to find out more about how to sound like a native speaker. This course will not only teach you what sounds and accent patterns you have, it will help you understand how pronunciation, intonation and speaking style affect your communication. You’ll learn my SMART techniques for making a real change in your speech.
Along the way, you will learn how to hear your own error patterns and correct them. You’ll learn that your accent acts as a filter on your hearing, too, and how to overcome this when listening to English and speaking it yourself.
In the first few chapters we’ll learn the basic building blocks of pronunciation and intonation and the sequence of steps you can take to change your speech. I’ll walk you through the best way to practice and the most important sounds to work on first. As we move through the course, we’ll add more sounds and patterns, get into more details of intonation and how we really talk in fluent speech. We’ll cover all of those tricky American sounds like R and Th, and American vowels. I’ll show you how it all comes together and how you can integrate your new skills when you’re talking at work or in social situations. I’ll help you set goals and give you a lot of great resources for practicing.
The content of this course is designed to work through the most important steps first, one week at time, over the 6 weeks, but you will have access to the past lessons to use the videos and practice materials to as you work to change your speech. Especially as we layer multiple practice targets into your weekly practice, you may want to review particular videos to help you remember the techniques we discussed in earlier lessons. These online materials will serve as an online resource which you can continue to use when the 6 weeks have concluded. In addition, you may download the materials to use for personal practice offline.
