I was improving my pronunciation in front of a mirror concentrating on my lips and then I decided to use the camera on my laptop for that. I use websites for the exercising e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfekvC0_1kAmhdOHULccXUg and also another useful websites recommended by our teacher. I record my voice and compared the voice with native speakers. There is a big difference between my voice and theirs, of course. I’m going to continue with improving the pronunciation and believe that I can speak similarly like them.

When there is nobody around me I try to improve my pronunciation and concentrate on my lips. In fact, it’s not very easy for me because I’m not used to using my lips as much as native speakers. It’s really unusual for me to open my mouth like native speakers so I have to concentrate on that all the time.

I also have an account on a very useful website https://www.englishcentral.com/courses#!/index/8-pronunciation

There are many useful videos and exercises where you can improve your pronunciation. You can record your voice and check over if you pronounced vowels, consonants or sentences properly. There are exercises with animation of your tongue’s position when you are pronouncing individual vowels or consonants. There is everything you need for improving your pronunciation, actually.

I was trying to pronounce vowels concentrating on my lips and my tongue’s position, then some consonants and also simple sentences. I was quite good at it but unfortunately only when I was pronouncing individual vowels or consonants. For example “θ” sound – I am able to pronounce the sound even in words, but when I try to pronounce the sound in sentences like “I think that there were three of them.” I can’t help myself, and I always get into a tangle pronouncing the sentence. I can pronounce the sentence very slowly. I think that it requires more time and practice and I should be patient.

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October - November, 2014

I’m still improving my pronunciation in front of a mirror concentrating on my lips and I’m trying to pronounce the vowels properly. I also record my pronunciation which is very useful for me, because I can compare how I was pronouncing vowels and words in the past with how I pronounce them these days. I use the same website as last time to help me with my pronunciation of vowels:

https://www.englishcentral.com/courses#!/index/8-pronunciation

I’s quite difficult for me to recognise the different sound of these vowels:

“e”, “ǣ”. I was listening to these vowels more than any others but still, in many cases, I’m not able to recognise which of these two was used.

As for transcription, I try to transcribe simple sentences and I can recognise the progress I’ve made. When I was doing my homework where we had to transcribe all sentences, I made some mistakes so at first I decided to transcribe only individual words and then I transcribed the sentences. It was quite good, because finally I didn’t make many mistakes. I have big problems with stresses. When I know the word, it’s not a problem to recognise in what position the stress is, but I make many mistakes when I have to sign stresses in sentences. I made really many mistakes and I don’t know how to improve this skills. I made so many mistakes probably because I couldn’t listen to the text we had to transcribe. To check my transcription I use this website: https://www.photransedit.com/Online/Text2Phonetics.aspx

I would like to speak fluently one day and that’s why I decided to use these two websites for improving my spoken production:  

https://esl-bits.net/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/

Firstly I read the text of a topic and then I listen to the topic. After that, I listen to the individual sentence and then I try to repeat the sentence and at the same time I record myself. It’s really very hard to pronounce all these sentences like native speakers and I’ve found it impossible for the time being. When I want to pronounce long sentences I have very big problems with it but I believe that one day it will be fine.

I also decided to speak with an English teacher on the skype to improve my spoken interaction. I think that I found a good teacher and I have these lessons four times a week. Every lesson takes about an hour and I’ve made really good progress. Unfortunately, I could recognise the progress only at the beginning. I record all these lessons and when I compared the very first lesson with the fifth lesson I could recognise that I’m more confident when I speak English and the progress was recognisable but when I compared the sixth lesson with the twelfth lesson I almost didn’t recognise the progress. I have to improve my vocabulary to be able to speak about more topics and also to improve my pronunciation.

I also use this website for learning English (spoken production, sentence stress etc.) https://www.englishclub.com/