Improving students' accents

[Ben]

My advanced students are all terribly concerned about their French accents and want to know how to improve them. I sent them to videos on youtube and I recommended trying to copy voices of newscasters or TV characters but beyond that I don't know what to say. Any advice?

[sepidehfattahi]

In my view, the best way to learn English accent is just by listening to natives which is achieved by watching English movies, news, TV programs,etc.

[timf]

What about selecting some key vocabulary that they have problems with and practicing the pronounciation with those words? I teach in Spain and here they have alot of trouble with their "R" words (red, road, read, roar, etc.). And by focusing on their weaknesses their pronounciation has improved quite a bit.

[AlexCase]

It seems a little silly to me to work on R sounds with Spanish speakers, because their rolled Rs never cause communication problems and there are some native speaker accents (e.g. Scottish) which are similar.

For French speakers, one of the biggest problems is dropping h. We've recently put up a list of minimal pairs like this on EnglishClub:

http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciatio ... airs-h.htm