English Accent Training- pronounce long words and the word ending ‘tion’

A  few customers recently asked me how to pronounce words ending in the common ending ‘tion’ which can also be spelt  ‘cion.’  The ‘tion’ spelling is the most common though.

As you can see from the cat and mouse picture, the word ‘motion’ also ends in ‘tion’ !!

I am sure you have already noticed that for English pronunciation,  common endings aren’t pronounced the way they look !

The ‘tion’ or ‘cion’ common endings are usually pronounced as a weak syllable, so the /o/ sound becomes a schwa /ə/ sound.  It is pronounced like a short /u/ sound.  The ‘tion’ and ‘cion’ are pronounced  ‘shən’.

I decided to make a recording for you to continue your English accent training practise.  At the same time, you can practise your accent reduction and English pronunciation, and English stress patterns for multisyllabic words. You can also find more examples to practise with in our English pronunciation audio courses. Click here.

English Accent Training- pronounce long words and the word ending ‘tion’

As we practise with the audio recording below, I will also point out any other weakly stressed syllables in the practise words aside from the weakly stressed ‘tion’ syllable.

The words we will be practising are:

addition, satisfaction, duration, accommodation, location, connection, position, interruption, invention, distortion, retention, vacation, amplification, caution.

 Practise sentences:

1) They looked at their vacation accommodation with satisfaction.

2) There were many interruptions to their internet connection.

3) He was cautioned when his new invention increased the guitarists amplification, and caused great sound distortion.

English Accent Training- pronounce long words and the word ending ‘cion’

There are only two common nouns that end in ‘cion’:

suspicion, coercion

Practise sentence:

There was no suspicion of coercion in the court case.

Enjoy practising,

Best wishes, Esther