The speech accent archive is a project run by Stephen H. Weinberger at the George Mason University Program of Linguistics.  He and his colleagues and students have collected and phonetically transcribed hundreds of speech samples from English native speakers and learners from around the world.  Everyone reads the same short script so you can really hear the differences in accent!  It’s a fun way to travel around the world, linguistically!...

TED is an incredible organization that brings some of the most intelligent and passionate people in the world together to give lectures and inspire the rest of us with their ideas.  They also have subtitles in many languages and an excellent interactive transcript tool for every video.  For a taste of the amazing minds who participate in TED lectures, watch neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran talk about some very unusual things he has discovered...

It is possible to do some speaking practice alone, especially accent training. Choose a speaker of English who you like, someone who you think has a good accent. Try and find some videos of this person speaking on youtube or on DVD, and take a section that’s about 30 seconds long. Listen carefully to it: pay attention to the speed, the rhythm, the intonation and the pauses. Now go to Vocaroo (or use recording software on your PC) and record...

The British Library has a really incredible resource: a map of the United Kingdom that you can click on to hear the accents in different regions.  It’s really remarkable how different they are, even within the same city!  This means that many of the recordings are quite difficult to understand, but sometimes transcripts are provided.

Elllo.org has a searchable database of hundreds of interviews with native and non-native English speakers from around the world with a short comprehension quiz at the end.  Use the search box to find something that’s interesting to you!  Some of the interviews have transcripts and some don’t.