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. 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! 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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