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.
0 Comments
About a year into my graduate music theory studies at Indiana University, I took a Teaching Music Theory class with one of my favorite professors, a professor known for his excellent teaching. While I don't remember the context in which he offered it, he once told us a funny story about the way he best learns information. He mentioned that sometimes, when he needs to remember something, he will write it down—but then he'll throw the paper away! His wife always teases him about this. However, there's some truth to what my professor said: writing something out by hand is a great way to lock it in your brain!
As long as you don't have something like a Disorder of Written Expression or motor dysgraphia, you might also find that (re)writing necessary information on paper, by hand, is a great way to commit it to memory! This is why I always recommend that clients new to studying English (or any client interested in improving his/her grammar skills!) review the comments I've left in each paper's margins and rewrite them by hand in a notebook. I think you'll find that if you do this, your grammar and usage skills in English will improve much more quickly! This might be especially helpful if your first language doesn't use the Latin alphabet, because it will provide writing practice using the Latin alphabet too. Have you tried rewriting my paper comments by hand to retain the information in them more accurately? If so, let me know how it worked for you! |
Archives
June 2021
Categories
All
|