Pronunciation is one of the four Speaking criteria — equal weight to Fluency, Lexical Resource and Grammar — but most students never practice it deliberately. The good news: examiners aren’t grading whichaccent you have. They’re grading whether you’re intelligible, whether you control stress and rhythm, and whether your intonation supports your meaning. Three things, all trainable.
Three vowel-pair traps that drop intelligibility
- ship vs sheep
- Short /ɪ/ vs long /iː/. ‘The ship is leaving’ vs ‘the sheep is leaving’. If your ‘sit’ sounds like ‘seat’, train this one.
- cap vs cup
- /æ/ vs /ʌ/. Speakers from Asia, Africa and southern Europe often merge these. Mouth shape matters — /æ/ is wide, /ʌ/ is narrow.
- thin vs tin / sin / fin
- /θ/ is the unvoiced ‘th’. Many languages don’t have it. Tongue between teeth, gentle puff of air. Skipping it is the most common intelligibility leak.
Word stress — the Band 6 / Band 7 line
English is a stress-timed language. Get the wrong syllable stressed and natives can fail to recognise the word entirely.
Wrong stress
- com-FOR-table
- vege-TA-ble
- pho-TO-graphy
- ECO-nomic
Right stress
- COM-fort-able (3 syllables, not 4)
- VEG-tə-bl (3 syllables, not 4)
- pho-TOG-ra-phy
- e-co-NOM-ic
Sentence stress — the rhythm rule
English speakers stress content words (nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and de-stress function words (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, pronouns). Get this rhythm right and your Pronunciation score lifts a band.
"I've been LIVING in MEL-bourne for THREE years and I REALLY like it."
Capitalised syllables are stressed (longer + louder + higher). Function words like ‘I’ve’, ‘been’, ‘in’, ‘for’, ‘and’, ‘it’ squash together — that's the natural English rhythm.
Intonation — three patterns to nail
- Falling — for statements
- “I work as a doctor.” — voice falls on ‘doctor’. Confident, complete.
- Rising — for yes/no questions + uncertainty
- “Have you been to Italy?” — rises on ‘Italy’. Also rises slightly when you’re unsure (hedging).
- Rise-fall — for lists + contrasts
- “I like reading↗, walking↗, and cooking↘.” — items rise except the last, which falls (signalling the list is closed).
Pick the syllable that gets stressed
In the word “photograph”, which syllable is stressed?
Pick one. You'll see why straight away.