People love accents! When my friend was taking a class at our university, she confessed that her professor’s posh British accent was so attractive to her that she’d close her eyes in lecture and pretend that the professor was Prince William. Several other friends specifically enrolled in classes with a particular Italian professor new to the music faculty just so they could enjoy hearing him lecture—not because they cared about the course topic. Maybe you’ve found that people admire your own accent in this way, as well, if you have one. More likely, people are just admiring your accent without telling you!
So, then, why would you want to reduce your accent in English? And how can accent reduction coaching help your writing, anyway? Accent coaching will be the most helpful for your writing if you are what some people call an auditory learner. That just means that you take in information most easily by listening to it. You might enjoy live lectures, audiobooks, or listening to the radio if you are a primarily auditory learner. You also probably use sound (heard or imagined) to figure out spellings and tenses when you write. If you’re sounding out words during the writing process, this is where your own accent can cause spelling errors. For example, if your regional accent doesn’t distinguish the short A and short E vowels, you might write “gethering” instead of “gathering.” (I saw this error in a colleague’s writing recently.) Another common issue is mixing up the pure I vowel (like in the word “see”) with the short I vowel (as in the word “it”). Certain varieties of Mandarin Chinese only use the short I, for example. Not having experience with the pure I vowel can cause writers to mix up “this” and “these”—particularly if the “Z” consonant in “these” is also not in their first language’s sound bank (as in Korean). I also recently edited a document whose author’s first language does not use the “ST” and “TS” consonant clusters, which caused that author to miss the endings on English words like “suggests” and “Tufts.” So what does this all mean? Well, if you undergo accent training (sometimes called diction training or coaching), and you learn to produce these new sounds physically and then hear them accurately, this can help you remember those sounds (and their spellings) when you write certain words whose sounds and spellings match. When I taught the aforementioned Mandarin-L1 author how to produce the pure I vowel, her ability to distinguish words like “this” and “these” immediately improved because she could now hear and produce the different “I” vowels herself while writing. This also tapped into her kinesthetic learning (learning by doing) ability because I had taught her how to move her mouth and tongue to produce the sounds. If accent coaching sounds like a helpful addition to your English studies, just get in touch with me through the Contact page to set up some sessions! As a piano accompanist who frequently coaches opera singers on pronunciation in Italian, French, and German-language repertoire, I am very experienced in coaching accent development in nonnative speakers.
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In my 5+ years as a freelance editor on the IU campus, I've worked with hundreds of clients whose first languages have ranged from Arabic to Thai (and everything in between!). Depending on each client's educational background—and especially if the first language uses a writing system other than the Latin alphabet—I have found that most English-L2 academic editing clients' speaking skills in English tend to be much stronger than their writing skills, at least when they haven't worked with an editor regularly. Native speakers with dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other disorders of written expression may also be much more comfortable speaking than writing in English.
If you speak more easily and fluently than you write in English, this tip is for you! Even if you are not an especially auditory (ear-based) learner, this tip may still be helpful. This tip is as easy as downloading a free audio recording app onto your iPhone or other smartphone. (I have an Android device and use one simply called Audio Recorder.) Next time you want to write a paragraph or even a sentence in your next paper, just think through what you want to say and say it out loud into the audio recording app on your phone. Then replay the recording and type the words you just spoke! More often than not, you'll find a simpler and clearer way to say something when you are just speaking it into the recording device, because you're not attempting to impress your professors with your big vocabulary. Remember, though: well-constructed ideas, spoken or written clearly and simply, are going to be much more convincing to the reader (your professor) than a bunch of unnecessarily long and unclear sentences that you stuffed with big words to impress your reader. Those of you whose first language uses another writing system (not the Latin alphabet) may see the most immediate benefit from this speech-to-audio-recorder technique, since it takes more brainpower (specifically working memory) to hold your idea in your head as you translate that idea into a written alphabet with which you may not be entirely comfortable yet. If you record your speech first and type what you said later, your working memory doesn't have to hold that idea for several minutes as you pick out the letters and words. That way, your idea is less likely to be "lost in translation" as it's being transferred from your brain to the computer screen. Try speaking your ideas into the recorder app as you write your next paper and let me know how it worked for you! |
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