Ielts speaking--how to improve your bandscore

Chapter Eleven:
Pronunciation
How important is pronunciation in IELTS Speaking?
One of the criteria in assessing speaking is pronunciation. It is 25 percent of your
IELTS Speaking score. It is as important as grammar, vocabulary, and
organization of ideas. Thus, a low mark in pronunciation might ruin your
chances of getting a high band score.
Pronunciation is different from accent. In IELTS Speaking, a candidate is not
penalized for having an accent but for pronunciation errors. These are
mispronounced words and words that most people in your country pronounce
incorrectly when speaking in English.
Your pronunciation score is based on clarity, speed of speech, word stress,
sentence stress and intonation.
Speaking with clarity means that you have to speak clearly so that the examiner
can understand you. You do not need to sound like a native speaker, and you do
not need to rush.
In IELTS Speaking, you have to speak at a moderate speed. When we say
moderate, it means that you don’t speak too fast or too slow. Remember that you
are communicating your ideas to be understood.
How can you improve your English pronunciation?
Pronunciation practice is not done a week or a month before the IELTS exam. It
should be months before. When you speak in English, it is not easy to break the
old habit of not producing the right sound and to learn the right one.
Listen to spoken English as much as possible and imitate how the words are
uttered. Follow the way a native speaker utters a word.
Learn the phonetic transcription of words through a dictionary. When you learn
new vocabulary, do not just know the meaning but also the pronunciation. This

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can be done by having a list of IELTS items of vocabulary for speaking with
their transcriptions. Make sure that you know how to read each phonetic symbol
(see http://www.stuff.co.uk/calcul_nd.htm).
Learn how to stress words correctly. Every word has its own stress. For example,
the word conduct, which is a noun, has its stress on the first syllable con, while
the verb form has its stress on the second. Stress is very important. A wrong
word stress is more often the cause of misunderstanding than the wrong
pronunciation of words. In your dictionary, you will see an apostrophe (’) before
the syllable to be stressed. Take for instance: be’lieve. The apostrophe is before
the syllable lieve; therefore, this should be stressed. A stressed syllable should be
read emphatically.

Know which sound gives you difficulty in speaking English. Practise the sound
that you have difficulty enunciating. You can use minimal pairs to distinguish
the difference between sounds. You may have difficulty distinguishing /p/ and
/f/, /b/ and /v/, /r/ and/l/, among others. For Mandarin speakers, work on the
voiced /th/, Koreans with /r/ and /l/ and /p/ and /f/, and the same case goes for
the Japanese. Arabic speakers have difficulties in /p/ and /b/ sounds (see
http://www.shiporsheep.com/).
Know intonation and sentence stress. It is common knowledge that our voice
goes up at the end in a question and down in a statement. With sentence stress,
you have to remember that not all the words are stressed. Stressed words are
those content words—verbs and nouns. Unstressed words such as pronouns,
connectors, and prepositions don’t carry weight, and they are short in length.
This means that uttering them need not be long or lengthy.
Be familiar with spelling patterns. Words with ough must have an /f/ sound, as in
the words tough, enough, and rough; oh for the words dough and even though;
and ot for bought and thought.