To be honest in the IELTS everything is important. If you want to achieve a really high band then you need to focus on every, tiny part of your English to maximise your chances. So yes, pronunciation is important especially if your pronunciation might stop the examiner from understanding everything you say or if you feel that your accent is strong.
Generally an accent is not such a big deal if it is not overly strong and doesn’t impede understanding or your performance. The examiner will be aware of your accent and they may even note anything you mis-pronounce or anything which doesn’t sound quite right in English. This could include the wrong word or sentence stress or a lack of natural intonation. For example questions usually have an upward intonation at the end (as do lists) and in a statement the voice will go down.
This indicates that you have finished and the other person can speak – if you keep going up at the end of every sentence then other people will not speak as it appears you have not finished (politicians use this trick when they don’t want to be interrupted!!). There are, of course other linguistic signals such as specific words and phrases but intonation plays a role too.
The best way to find out if your pronunciation needs attention is to ask your teacher. If you don’t have a teacher to ask then see what happens when you practise speaking to other people – do they ask you to repeat things? Do they sometimes give you wrong answers to your question or say things that don’t really fit with what you are saying? This could be because they are not really following everything you say and this could be an indication that there may be things you need to address in your pronunciation. Finally you can simply record yourself and see how it sounds. Be critical and see how you might improve your pronunciation.
When I was learning French at school we spent a lot of time on pronunciation (French is not an easy language to pronounce) and one of the main ways of doing this was by reading things out loud – especially poetry. Reading out loud is a good way of improving your sounds, word stress and getting the sentence stress correct. If you read a poem out loud you will also have to include the intonation too to get the right emotion and it’s a really lovely exercise!
Do some reading out loud and record yourself.
Another fun thing to do for pronunciation is tongue-twisters – great for practising sounds:
‘She sell seashells on the seas-shore’ – try it and say it slowly then very fast – that’s the fun part.
I made these pronunciation exercises quite a long time ago – I hope you can manage some of them 😊
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