American English Language School

You have studied the grammar. You know the vocabulary. But when you speak, something still sounds off — and native speakers slow down or ask you to repeat. If that sounds familiar, the problem is probably not your English words. It is the sound layer underneath them. In our ESL classes in Irvine , this is one of the most common breakthroughs students have. Here are three of the fixes we work on every week at AELS Irvine. Link your words instead of separating them Learners tend to pronounce each word cleanly and separately: "an — apple." Native speakers glue them: "anapple." Same with "turn it off" (turn-i-toff). When a word ends in a consonant and the next begins with a vowel, they connect. This single habit does more for how natural you sound than a hundred new vocabulary words. Ride the rhythm of the sentence English is stress-timed. Nouns, verbs and adjectives get length and volume; small words like of , to , the and a get squeezed almost to n...