Everyone knows that the person’s first language affects the way they sound when they speak English. For example a person whose first language is Arabic will sound different speaking English from a person whose first language is Polish. But do you know why?
The answer is simple: mouth position. Mouth position means whether your mouth is open or closed most of the time when you speak (whether your jaws, upper and lower teeth, are close together or wide apart).
Many people automatically use the mouth position typical to their first language when speaking English and it makes their speech harder to understand. The reason we’re bringing this up is that once you know what affects your pronunciation, you can work on it, and thus improve your Speaking IELTS score.
Georgie Taylor, a Speech Pathologist and accent specialist with over 9 years of experience, says that to speak English more like a native speaker (and therefore more clearly) you need to open and close your mouth quite a lot – compared to languages such as Japanese, Cantonese or Russian, for example.
In this short video Georgie explains about the right way to move your mouth in English and even gives you a great exercise to start your day. To make sure you understand every word we prepared a transcript of the video – click here to download.
If your pronunciation needs a bit of work, here is another great resource to try – this page (click here) allows you to record and compare your own pronunciation to that of a native speaker. Mimicking a native speaker’s pronunciation is a very good way to improve your own.
P.S. The website you will be visiting, Star Pronunciation, offers online pronunciation courses that Georgie created after working face-to-face for many years with international professionals and university students. If you decide to seriously improve your pronunciation using any of Georgie’s courses, copy this text IELTSBlog and paste it at the checkout and you will get a $45 discount (the discount text is case sensitive). This price reduction is exclusive to IELTS-Blog.com visitors, not available anywhere else.