Hello

I am Harsh Kadepurkar from India, the first guest teacher on this website.

I do not propose to offer any advice on improving pronunciation. However, I would like to share my experience. I have realised that pronunciation is not a problem of  Indian students alone. It's a universal problem of all the second language learners. Yes, we need to overcome it. One of the ways is to first clearly understand and to list down the differences between the two languages, the learner's language and the target language and focus on those aspects. Luckily a lot of work has been done in this area and is available either in the form of books or dissertations in university libraries. Unfortunately most of these dissertations are gathering dust, at least in most libraries in India. Next thing would be to give them as much of listening experience as possible, using authentic sources. I mean the BBC or any such source.Thirdly, try to change your approach. Your learners are not wrong in their pronunciations, they are just different. There's nothing wrong in being different. Tell your learners that if they want to communicate with their own people their variety of English is just fine. But if they want to communicate at the international level, they will have to minimise the differences. We are not native speakers of English and we can never be. At the most we can go as close as possible. Tell them that even in the UK there are four major varieties of English: Irish, Scottish, Wales and British. And within them there are a large number of sub varieties.

I said I won't give any advice. And I did just that. Sorry about it. But can't help it. Have been a teacher for a long, long time!