AMERICAN ACCENT TRAINING,

American Accent Training, is a book and CD set by Ann Cook. You can buy it on
Amazon.com. As the title suggests, this is a pronunciation-only system. It is designed for
one thing-- to improve your English pronunciation and get you to speak more like an
American.

This system has two major strengths. First, it focuses mostly on intonation rather than
individual sounds.

Most pronunciation books and CDs focus on the sounds of difficult letters. For example,
they spend a lot of time on pronouncing "r" and "l". The result is that students improve
these sounds a little, but their overall pronunciation is still terrible.

For most students, INTONATION, not the sounds of letters, is their big problem. Poor
intonation is the reason native speakers cannot understand you. Which is why I like
American Accent Training-- the program focuses on the most important pronunciation skill.

The second strength of this program is that it is listening based. Surprisingly, many
pronunciation programs focus on the EYES instead of the ears. I've seen a lot of books with
complicated drawings of the mouth and tongue, for example. All these complicated
drawings are useless.

American Accent Training includes 5 CDs, so it is listening focused. And as all Effortless
English members know, you learn to speak by listening. You improve speaking with your
ears, not your eyes. This is true for pronunciation, as well as fluency, grammar, and
vocabulary.

American Accent Training, however, does have one big weakness. It is boring. There are a
lot of word lists and sentences to practice, but not of them has any meaning. You spend
your time practicing random words and sentences. So, the biggest challenge with this
program is finishing it.

I recommend American Accent Training only for students who are advanced and who want
to focus all of their energy on pronunciation. If you are very motivated to improve your
pronunciation, and can endure some boredom, the program will help you.

For everyone else, I recommend using movies and my english conversation lessons to
improve pronunciation. These are much more interesting to use. Simply listen carefully,
pause after each sentence, and copy the speaker's pronunciation. Make it a game-- pretend
you are an actor!

Good luck with your English learning :)