Job Discussion Forums

[James Hetfield]

I'd like to include "ACCENT REDUCTION" as a skill I could tutor privates in Latin America. My TEFL course reviewed a Tongue/Teeth/Mouth/Throat chart for vowel and consonant pronunciations. LET'S CLARIFY: ACCENT REDUCTION same as PRONUNCIATION CORRECTION, or you see these as two separate disciplines?

REDUCING pronunciation errors: Is this more a SCIENCE in which you could chart each error, or an ART which anyone could do if they are a good listener? Some on previous thread say accent removal is almost impossible and not worth the hard work. BUT some L2 sounds so bad it hurts to listen. Worst I've heard is the India accent, especially from Indians who learned in public schools and fell into bad habits without any Native English speaker to ever correct them.

When I listen to Free Speech Radio I have to brace myself: Several correspondents in India suffer an intolerably painful accent: Every word with accent on 1st syllable they mispronounce as accent on 2nd syllable, combined with high-speed mangling of grammar that hurts ears like nails on a chalkboard.

HAVE YOU BEEN EFFECTIVE correcting pronunciation? Did you use SCIENCE, with charts and mouth-shaping, or was it more an ART of good listening combined with student dedication?

[spiral78]

I think you'd be more realistic to call it 'accent reduction.'

Personally, I think it's both an art and a science. Yes, there are some techniques that can help tremendously, but if your student happens to have a tin ear, the outcome (while better than without the benefit of science) will still be below that talented,motivated student with a good ear.

[James Hetfield]

Word. I just edited to replace REMOVAL with REDUCTION.

Any more responses out there?

HAVE YOU BEEN EFFECTIVE reducing accent or correcting pronunciation?

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

I've done it (meaning, I've been successful at it when I've tried it in the past), to an extent (as part of English teaching, not as a subject on it's own). I think you need to have more background than just seeing a chart, though. It takes a lot of practice to be able to identify sounds that are made, you go on what is actually produced, not what you think ***should*** be produced (and therefore just looking at a word written down and then writing the IPA for it, isn't useful), so you need to really, REALLY know the sounds that the students are making (this includes knowing the sounds, and the way they are articulated, which AREN'T in English). Vowels are particularly hard. Probably you need to take a university course dedicated only to phonetics (in those types of courses often tests consist of listening to language that you don't know and possibly have never even heard before and transcribing what you hear into IPA so that someone else who has never heard the language before could actually reproduce those sounds), after having already studied both phonetics and phonemes in a linguistics survey course. And then after that, then you start to see that a big part of the issue with accent modifcation is in sentential stress- not phonemes or phonetics at all. And also word choice. And so on. It's really a LOT more than just knowing a chart.

Short TEFL / TESOL courses give people the impression that they are learning everything that they need to know, but in reality, it's like anything else. You could be taught 'how to be' (in reality, it's more like 'about being') a book editor, or a PR guy, or a copywriter, or journalist, or novelist, or poet or any other language related job in a month or less, but that would actually only be a very, very superficial overview of topics that people in these careers actually study in depth, and most likely continue to study on their own in an informal manner both as part of their jobs and in their free time (if you don't like your language related job, get a different job- one that you can leave and forget at the end of the day. For most people, you can make as much or more money in retail management than at a language job- not many journalists will become editors of papers, not many copywriters will go on to be creative directors, not many book editors will ever move into the top positions of book publishers). It's similar to the philisophy that because you speak English, you can teach it (because you can read a very influential, bestselling book for English Lit class and analyse the metaphors and symbolism, you can therefore write a very influential, bestselling book). Another example of that standard could be to say that because you've done elementary school, you can teach elementary school. It's just not really true. Look at it this way: To teach ESL in a university, you need a master's degree, usually in an Applied Linguistics (TESOL) related area. To be a speach therapist you ALSO need a degree in Applied Linguistics, but it's a DIFFERENT APPLICATION of linguistics (it's a different degree area). And you most likely aren't going to be a speech therapist without a master's degree in Speech Therapy. Accent modification is an area related to speech therapy.

It's not really pronounciation correction in that there are different English accents and so no one native accent is best. English is an offical language of Singapore, but (depending on the person) there are a lot of similarities between Singapore English and Indian English.

I don't see accent modification as a particularly necessary thing to do most of the time, but I do see it as something I can help people with, if they really want to work on it (and if it actually IS a barrier to people understanding them then it definately is something that needs at least a bit of attention).

Read (or even better, go see) Pygmalion. It's an awesome play and it's about accent modification (in the early 20C). Not sure if I'd call it directly applicable to current life or accent modification in foreign language studies, though. But still, it's a great play!

[rusmeister]

It's both.
When I want to teach the phoneme, "th", for example, I jutht thtart thtalking with my thtongue bethtween my thteeth. Ith you thdo this thor a couple oth minuthes they thill get the thrift. Itth amathing how well that workth!

At least it eliminates that irritating 'z' - ""Zees ees mai haus" and so on.

[santi84]

My father in law took a Berlitz class sometime back in the 1980's for accent reduction (he's Francophone) and it was done through his employer (phone company that made calls to the rest of the Anglophone country). I don't know enough about the actual speech sciences of it, but I'd say there's a decent market in it for companies in addition to working with individuals!

[MO39]

[Justin Trullinger]