Name: Practise Speaking & Reading Out Loud with This English Shadowing Exercise
Uploaded: 2025-05-15T02:49:35.000Z
Duration: 16 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello, lovely students, and welcome back to English with Lucy.

Future continuous

In today's lesson, we're going to be practising an extremely important skill.

Adverbs of degree

It's more of a technique, and it's something that I really recommend to my students in order to improve their fluency in English.

It's something that I've done before on my channel.

Basically, I want you to read out loud with me.

You need to copy what I say just after I say it, nearly at the same time.

This is a fantastic way to improve your fluency and your pronunciation.

You will feel more comfortable with intonation, rhythm, connected speech, among other features.

The text we will read together today is extremely British.

I'm going to teach you how to make a perfect cup of tea.

I've divided it into stages, and after each stage, we'll go through some key pronunciation features to help you take your pronunciation skills to the next level.

To help you even further, I have created the ultimate shadowing guide.

Inside, you will find an even more in-depth pronunciation analysis of the text that I'll read today.

Inside, I also explain the shadowing technique in more detail.

I highlight its benefits, and I include some top tips and practical strategies to help you shadow correctly and effectively.

As an extra bonus, I've created an interactive vocabulary bank with some of the more advanced vocabulary and phrases from this lesson.

Not only will you be improving your pronunciation, but you'll also be building your vocabulary as well.

To download this, just click in the link in the description box or scan that QR code there.

You sign up to my mailing list, and the PDF guide will arrive directly in your email inbox.

The link is in the description box or scan the QR code there.

First of all, make sure you've selected the finest tea.

Many of my friends go for a fine, loose-leaf black tea, but for me, nothing beats a traditional

Then it's time to select your drinking vessel.

The moment has come to whip out granny's finest bone china.

Although that works for some, I personally prefer a novelty mug.

Drinking tea should make you smile, and what's guaranteed to bring a smile to your face?

Next, we select the freshest filtered water and fill the kettle.

Never ever re-boil water as it removes oxygen and will likely ruin your perfect brew.

The final stage of preparation, and this is the one my mother taught me not to skip.

Pour a little of your freshly boiled water into your chosen mug, give it a little swirl, and pour it out.

And before you ask, no, you may not boil the water in the microwave.

Was it comfortable speaking along with me?

Now let's take a look at some of the key pronunciation features in this text.

Then you can repeat this section again before moving on to the next one.

Did you notice how first of all sounded like one word?

That's because we take the consonant sound, t, at the end of first, and join it to the following vowel sound, ɜ, first t, first t, and we do the same with of.

We take the v sound at the end and attach it to all.

Vaul, to vaul, first to vaul, first to vaul.

So this consonant to vowel linking helps us to avoid unnecessary gaps between words.

It kind of sounds similar to the word festival, first of all.

There are more examples in the text too, like blend in a bag and face on it.

Here we have two identical consonant sounds together.

It's made by blocking airflow and then releasing it.

The other plosives are d, k, g, p, and b.

When we have two plosives together, we don't need to repeat the sound twice.

Instead, just get ready to make the first sound, hold a tiny bit longer than usual, and then release.

The same happens with not to skip, not to skip, not to skip.

With some consonant sounds, we don't need to pause at all.

I just lengthen it slightly, will likely.

Then we have a linking j sound between many and of.

Notice that I say the weak form there too.

We can add a soft j sound after words ending in e vowel sounds when they're followed by another vowel sound.

One distinctive feature of my accent, the modern RP accent, is that I only pronounce the letter r when it comes before a vowel sound.

This is true in individual words and also in connected speech.

So in this sentence here, I only make a r sound before the vowel sound a.

For a, for me, for a, for me, for a, for me.

Can you spot any more linking r's in the text?

Let me draw your attention to one more interesting feature here.

Listen to what happens when I read this phrase.

So when t and j sounds are next to each other like this, we often combine them to make a new sound, t, j, j.

So instead of saying what you, we can blend the sounds together and say what you.

Well, it's more efficient and we are all about saving energy when we speak.

I've put lots more information about pronunciation features like these in the free shadowing guide that you can download today.

The link is in the description or you can scan the QR code there.

Now we've gone through all of the pronunciation features from the first section.

Feel free to go back and try shadowing it again with me.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Practise Speaking & Reading Out Loud with This English Shadowing Exercise

stick

pronunciation

phrase

essential