YES, you can change your accent but you will need good guidance and lots of practice.
Motivation is a key factor. This can be driven by: To what degree you believe your accent is interfering with your communication vendre du viagra. Is it significantly impacting job performance, your advancement? Are you avoiding conversations in your everyday life? Are you concerned that it will lower your score on an English proficiency tests, such as the IELTS? Do people ask you to repeat yourself so often that you’re frustrated? Or do people focus more on your accent than they do on what you’re saying?
How you speak is a very personal issue, and changing it can make you uncomfortable on an unconscious level for a while, as you may feel that changing your speech is changing YOU. The good part of accent reduction is that once you master it you can then decide when you would like to speak Standard American English or the way you spoke before with your original accent.
To give you an idea of what is involved in accent reduction training you will be producing sounds differently in English than in your native language. The particular sounds needing change are largely determined by the sounds in your native language that are difficult for you when speaking English. You will also have to change your intonation patterns and the melody of your words and sentences. Learning these new skills can be fun. Remember you have already done the hard part – that is to have learned English, a difficult language. Reducing your accent will be comparatively much easier. Some people have a “good ear for accents.” That means an innate ability to know where the sound articulators are positioned in order to create accent specific sounds. When I work with people to change their accent, I show them how to place their articulators, lips, tongue and jaws in order to produce the new sound.
Children learn a language apparently effortlessly, for several reasons. First of all, because they are not as reading-oriented as an adult, they listen for the right things. Instead of wondering “how to spell it”, they repeat back EXACTLY what they hear — rhythms and pronunciation, regardless of spelling. Second, children are more willing to make mistakes. Adults don’t want to embarrass themselves, they don’t want to look foolish, and they don’t want to appear ignorant, so they stick with what they know. Third, children aren’t as “invested” in their original language as an adult might be — children are more willing to accept different ways of thinking, and different ways of saying things. All of which is to say that while a child may just “pick up” a native sounding accent, an adult can do the same thing (with extra work). There are limitations based on age. Adults may speak clearly and understandably in English, but listeners still have some idea of what country or region they are from.
I have found that many mispronunciations occur because people assume that if a word is spelled with an /o/, it should sound like an /o/ and not as an /a/. For example we say job (jab) not “jobe”. As the above paragraph stated, relying on your listening skills more rather than using the patterns from your first language will help.
Once you learn Standard American English, the fun part begins – integrating it into your life in a gradual manner. You need to continually practice speaking with American speakers and listen to their speech. You then need to take what you have learned and use it frequently.
By Ela Britchkow, Speech and Language Pathologist
©2016 Ela Britchkow
