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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Lately I've had the privilege to work with several clients who are bilingual from birth; that is, they were born and/or raised in the United States (or somewhere else where English is dominant) but their parents spoke another language with them at home. This is a gift for someone born in that environment (and I really wish I had been raised bilingual, but alas, my mixed ancestry did not allow for that!), but it can pose its own challenges when such a person starts writing academic work in one of those two first languages!
One challenge bilingual authors may face is that the syntax structures from the two languages (let's say English and Spanish for simplicity's sake) may mix with each other when the author is writing in one of those languages. Thus, their English may have Spanish-flavored syntax or their Spanish might use some unidiomatic, English-flavored syntax. As someone who learned Spanish as a teenager and has some bilingual-like characteristics (though I'm not truly bilingual from birth), I've noticed that when I have been speaking/writing in English for long periods, I often have difficulty code-switching and my written Spanish won't be completely fluent/free from English bleedthrough until I've been working in Spanish for awhile (maybe a couple hours). During my cruise ship performing tours, when I was trying to draft Spanish-language program notes for a new musical composition, I figured out that it was easiest for me to do so if I worked on them right after chatting with my Spanish-speaking friends on the ship for awhile (this wasn't hard to do, since my best friends on that ship were from Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico!). If you notice this in your own writing experience, then, you might try spacing out your writing schedule accordingly: rather than having a phone chat with a relative in your other first language and then immediately sitting down to write your latest dissertation chapter, try writing the chapter first (but also after you've been engaged with English for awhile, like by answering emails from your professors or watching an English-language TV show) and then calling your relative. You might see a real difference in what you produce! While this language mixing may never completely go away, depending on you and your brain wiring, you may want to try this experiment and see if it works for you. |
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