Hi everyone 🌼
I’d love to get your advice on improving my speaking flow and pronunciation. My English is at an upper-intermediate level, I can hold a conversation quite well, but my pronunciation still sounds a bit “Frenglish” (a mix between French and English accent 😅).
Recently, I gave the closing remarks at an international symposium. It went well, but I realized that my speaking sounded like I was reading from a paper, even though I was really engaged and passionate about what I was saying.
Do you have any tips or exercises to sound more natural, confident, and expressive when speaking English?
Many thanks in advance 💙

Question

Hi everyone 🌼
I’d love to get your advice on improving my speaking flow and pronunciation. My English is at an upper-intermediate level, I can hold a conversation quite well,  but my pronunciation still sounds a bit “Frenglish” (a mix between French and English accent 😅).
Recently, I gave the closing remarks at an international symposium. It went well, but I realized that my speaking sounded like I was reading from a paper,  even though I was really engaged and passionate about what I was saying.
Do you have any tips or exercises to sound more natural, confident, and expressive when speaking English? 
Many thanks in advance 💙

Answer

My advice is be yourself. If you're naturally more expressive, like a French person, stay that way - some English people are too. If you have a preferred sentence structure - keep it - the English language can accommodate it and your passion will shine through smoother when you're being yourself. As for the nuances of pronunciation I recommend finding a tutor who can listen to you pronounce a word, then repeat what you are doing and then say it correctly, to make it easy for you to hear the difference. Having said that, a lot of English people enjoy hearing French accented people speaking English - it's not a bad thing - I recommend embracing your accent - so long as it's intelligible it's fine and it can be an asset in your favour.

Answer

Hi there. Would you like to record 30 seconds of yourself speaking, and then post it on here? Or send it.

Answer

As Dan said, being intelligible is the goal. In today's global society, having an accent is normal and accepted.

If you do want to reduce your accent, pronunciation lessons can be very productive. Teaching pronunciation is a subspeciality within teaching English, and only a few teachers have training and experience in this subspeciality.  Look for a teacher with a linguistics background. If you do a teacher search for pronunciation, you will find over a thousand teachers. If you do a teacher search for phonology, you will find about 20 teachers.

I have taught pronunciation for years. The common problems for French speakers are difficulty with vowels (for example, "note" sounds like "nut"), difficulty with pronouncing the final sounds of words ("worked" [workt] sounds like "work" or "wor"), and using French stress patterns (English puts stress on information words, but French puts stress on the final syllable of a phrase).

Good luck!