Accent reduction is an area where it’s not uncommon for students to experience extreme frustration. Despite spending large sums of money paying for a private tutor, students often don’t achieve anywhere near the desired results. Learning English phonetics is easy. Improving your accent? That’s a different story.
Most schools provide their students with teaching materials to aid in their understanding of English phonetics and the speech mechanisms of the English language. This usually involves learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, the vowel sounds, the consonant sounds, linking, syllable stress, etc. Initially, the student may be impressed. They see all these methodically prepared charts and diagrams with detailed explanations. They do a few drills with the teacher and they are convinced that they must already be achieving results.
However, six months later, no one can tell that they’ve ever undertaken any accent improvement. The student has spent a considerable amount of money trying to improve their accent and now they feel like giving up. So, what’s happened?
This is a common situation that I first observed when I was teaching Japanese students at a pronunciation school in Tokyo many years ago. The founder of the school came from an engineering background and she was very proud of the work she had put into her course and teaching materials. The attention to detail was impressive. However, most students weren’t actually improving their accent or pronunciation. Instead, they were just learning about the theory of phonetics and pronunciation. As with anything, theory is one thing; putting it into practice is another.
Just like with grammar, you can be an expert in English grammar but that won’t make you conversationally fluent.
There’s a huge gap between understanding English phonetics and the actual practical application of improving your accent. This comes down to doing the relevant drills and exercises that will genuinely help you progress. For example, if you have a thick Spanish accent because you articulate sounds from the back of mouth, studying linking and the contraction of sounds is unlikely to help you sound more native-like.
So what’s the solution? Well based on my experience, we need to go through the following steps:
- The first step is to recognise the sounds that the student is having problems with. This is the diagnosis stage which for some reason is either skipped due to a lack of effort on the part of the teacher or even worse, the teacher may come up with some random generic diagnosis that isn’t actually relevant to the student. In other words, we can’t solve the problem until we can recognise the problem.
- Once we have identified what sounds are being incorrectly articulated, we need to understand why these sounds are being articulated incorrectly. How are the articulators positioned? How is the air being aspirated? Where is the sound resonating from? Is the student subconsciously activating regions of the vocal tract that need to be deactivated? I’ve had students with strong velar and gutteral sounds which were hindering their ability articulate English sounds correctly. In this situation, I give the students exercises to achieve this. We really need to take a close look.
- Next we need to apply the careful correction to each of the target sounds one by one. This can be tricky because, in my experience, many students want to focus on “rhythm” and “fluency”. They think or they’ve been told that there’s “nothing wrong with their pronunciation” and so instead they want to “work on their accent”. This is especially difficult if they had a teacher who didn’t provide honest and unbiased correction. An honest approach will require more work both from the teacher and the student. It’s possible that the student will lose motivation or perhaps the teacher is unsure they can really help the student. This is where an honest approach is important, even if it feels ‘harsh’ in the short term. We need to forget about feelings and tackle this from a practical point of view which will actually motivate the student in the long term.
- Once the student is able to mimic each sound with precision, the articulators have been properly tuned just like an instrument. Now we need to combine various sounds but this needs to be done very carefully and slowly. The student must make a conscious effort as they transition from one sound to another. The problem I often see is that students make make an effort as they transition slowly from one sound to another during basic practice but then they just expect to speak English at natural speed with perfect pronunciation without thinking about it. This is like going to a beginner’s dance class and expecting to dance like a professional when the basic muscle memory hasn’t been formed.
- Once the student understands how they need to articulate the target sounds correctly, they need to engage in very slow and controlled repetition exercises. This is what will form the correct muscle memory which will strengthen over time therby improving their speed and reflexes.
It really comes down to honesty from both the teacher’s and the student’s perspectives. I feel that many schools and teachers just have a generic teaching method they apply to everyone, regardless of the specific problems each student encounters. The student develops an understanding of phonetics, but are they really improving their accent?
From my perspective as a teacher, I understand the amount of work that needs to go into this which is why I’m selective about taking on new students. If I’m going to provide the proper correction, I need to give the student my full attention and this is not easy. We need consistency and patience. With an honest approach and a long term outlook, it would be a miracle not to achieve good results.
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