What is Accent Reduction?

Note: I am posting this in the Skype section because, although I am an experienced speech therapist and English as second language tutor, I have not tutored online and I am interested in this. I am curious about whether or not Skype is a good medium for accent reduction. If ESLC members would like to experiment with me, I would be happy to provide my services free of change.

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. We are used to hearing foreign accents. There is no reason why people who move to the U.S, from other countries should feel a need to speak exactly like people born in the U.S. However, there are situations in which making one's accent more American is a good idea. As an English as second language tutor, I have found that the students who want to change their accents are usually people who find it difficult to make themselves understood. These people say that they find it difficult to understand others. A student may say to me, “You are easy to understand, but other people talk too fast.” A good thing about accent reduction is that the work also makes understanding people easier – including people who talk too fast and mumble their words instead of speaking clearly. I have found that students who have difficulty with accent are often very good learners. These students complain that they were taught English too much with books and too little with speech, so that were always unsure about the sounds of speech.

Two approaches to accent reduction

There are two ways that a student’s accent can be improved. One is correcting the pronunciations of words by teaching the sounds that make up words. The other is teaching the sounds of English in sentences. The work can be done the first way, the second way, or both, depending on the student’s needs.

1. Pronunciations. Words are made of sounds called “phonemes.” In Spanish, phonemes are about the same as letters of the alphabet, but in English, they’re different. The word “should” has only three phonemes: /sh/, the vowel in the middle, and /d/ on the end. The work begins with assessing the student’s speech to see which phonemes are pronounced incorrectly. Different things are used for choosing which phonemes to teach. For example, a sound that is heard more often in English speech is more important.

2. The sounds of English in sentences. Spanish and English are different in their “music,” things like the length of a sound and how high or low the sound’s pitch is. If I said, “I’m so glad to see you,” there would be more stress on “glad” and “see.” The word “see” would last longer than the other words and it would be said with a higher pitch. One way to practice these sounds is for the student to simply repeat sentences, but there’s a better way. There are exercises in which the student makes a sentence by using words from the tutor. For example, the student hears a sentence and then substitutes one word for another:

“I was walking down the street.” ----> “I was running down the street.”