Pronunciation: vowel sounds

To improve your pronunciation of American English, let’s begin with vowel sounds.

Directions:

1. Listen to the audio while reading each word.
2. Read each word out loud with the audio.
3. Read the words without the audio.

Click here to begin the pronunciation program.

short vowel sounds

long vowel sounds

difficult vowel sounds

vowel sounds + r

Teachers: To print out these exercises, click here.

This section of the website shows the relationship between spelling and sound. Because English borrows words from so many other languages, there are some letter combinations that defy whatever rules you may have learned in school. This is not a standard approach to teaching pronunciation (I find the IPA approach confusing!), but one of my students asked me to do something like this. Well, here it is.