English pronunciation can be challenging for students so we’ve created this list of English pronunciation resources. Partially English pronunciation is difficult because spelling has little to do with the way words are pronounced, making it hard to know how to say some words.

But of course the bigger problem is that English will have sounds that don’t exist in your native language, that your mouth doesn’t know how to make and maybe even your can’t hear yet.

So here are some great resources we’ve found to help with your English pronunciation.

Practice Your English Pronunciation With Poetry

1. The first English pronunciation resource is The Poetry Foundation is one of my favorites. Not only do you get to practice your English reading skills with some of the best English language poems, but many of the poems come with free audio recordings of the author reading the poem. So you can read along and listen carefully to how the words should be pronounced. Here’s Robert Frost’s classic Mending Wall.

Improve Your Pronunciation With A Mirror!

2. The second English pronunciation resource, a mirror! Seriously, if you have done research into linguistics and language learning you will learn that children watch people’s mouths. So if you have YouTube and a mirror you can practice watching the mouths of English speakers and then watching yourself say things in the mirror. Different language speakers hold their mouths differently. You can learn more about that in our intensive pronunciation series. One of the best English teachers I have ever known was a colleague from Argentina, her accent and pronunciation was nearly perfect. When I asked her how she did she said she used a mirror to help her create the sounds and practiced with a mirror a lot. Our Intensive pronunciation course can help you improve a great deal.

Resources Online To Help With Your English Pronunciation

3. The University of Iowa in the U.S. has an excellent resource for English pronunciation on their website. Phonetics: The sounds of American English is an interactive webpage that lets you pick out specific sounds in the English language, and then gives you an animated example of how the inside of the mouth moves to make the sound, and a recording of the mouth of the person making the sound, as well as a recording of the sound itself. It’s an ambitious project, totally free, and probably the most useful I’ve found online. Check it out here.

Listening To Help Improve Your English Pronunciation

4. Santa Barbara College has produced a corpus of audio clips from real conversations. This is an excellent way to practice both your listening skills as well as your pronunciation skills. The audio is 2 minutes to 5 minutes in length and covers several topics. LOI English uses some of the audios for lessons we’ve created. You can also practice your pronunciation and listening skills by taking a look at our Listening Lessons Series here.

Improve Your Pronunciation With Tongue Twisters.

5. The last piece of advice to improve your pronunciation skills is to do tongue twisters. When practicing rolling my ‘r’ in Spanish I used several tongue twisters that helped. English has the many tongue twisters that will help you train your mouth, lips, and tongue in order to improve your pronunciation. Click here for some useful tongue twisters and our final English pronunciation resource.

Extra: You should decide if you are trying to do accent reduction and pronunciation help whether you want to focus on American English (Canada/US) or British English. There are differences and it is best to choose which you’d like to use and work on that pronunciation to avoid confusion. Just look at how we pronounce: