We’ll use part of the text from the story Peter Is Rescued for our speaking exercise. This is the fourth part of Advanced Lesson 4, or you can do it as an individual speaking exercise.

Instructions:

1. First, listen to the recording one time without speaking.
2. Play it again, but this time, pause it after a few words, and repeat them. Listen to a few more words, then pause again and repeat the words you heard.
3. Continue like this until you have repeated the entire recording.

Try to imitate the speaker’s intonation, the rhythm of his speech, and the stresses he puts on words and syllables. Imitate the pronunciation as well as you can.

But What About My Accent?

Don’t worry if you can’t speak with an accent that is identical to the speaker! That’s the great thing about English – it is spoken by many people around the world with many different accents. The important thing is that you speak so people can understand you. That has more to do with your intonation and the stress you put on words than because you can’t pronounce consonants like a native speaker would, for example.

Pronouncing Double Letters

There are several words in this text with double letters – suddenly, appeared, cell, fell, dressed, follow, all, and disappeared. Most of the time, these are pronounced as one letter. You don’t have to make these sounds longer, or extend them in any way.

However, if you see a place where one word ends with a sound and the next word begins with the same sound, you should extend the sound of the letter or put a small pause between them. Examples of this would be “Jesus said,” and “put to.” These would normally be pronounced by saying just one of the consonants, “s” or “t,” in a slightly extended way.