If you’ve caught yourself feeling limited and frustrated from verbal interactions , accent coaching could be an option for you. You know what you want to say, but your coworkers and unfamiliar listeners are frequently asking you to repeat your sentences, furrowing their brows while listening to you, or trying (and failing) to pretend that they understood you the first time. Such situations can make you feel frustratingly limited and unable to confidently get your point across.

Every person has an accent, and our ears are trained by our brains to hear the phonemes (or sounds in a language) of the language we are most comfortable with above all others. Accent coaching trains your brain to perceive the phonemic differences between your native language and English. Accent coaching also trains the parts of your speech mechanism (tongue, hard palate, soft palate, teeth, etc) to move differently in order to more closely adhere to the sound of Mainstream American English.

Teaching yourself to change your accent is possible but usually inefficient. When learning anything new, be it a musical instrument or a sport, results and improvement happen faster when there is a trained person guiding and giving feedback. As a speech-language pathologist, my training and background equips me to set measurable and achievable goals in speech intelligibility that will in turn make you feel more confident when speaking.

Accent coaching is for individuals who are confident in their command of the English. They know what they want to say, but their conversational partners get distracted or confused by how the words are being said. The analytical approach and foundation of finding the best evidence-based practices makes my background in speech-language pathology ideal for providing feedback and practice in efficient, targeted coaching sessions.

Sounding like a native speaker is possible but requires extra intensive work. For most clients, the goal is not to eliminate their accent entirely, but rather to modify their accent so it is easily understandable by native English speakers.

One individual coaching session typically lasts 60 minutes. Workshops typically last 2-3 hours.

I can meet you at your workplace, at a library, or at another public place of your choosing.

Contact liana@adaptableaccents.com for pricing. The evaluation can be done alone or credited towards a package of 4, 8, or 12 lessons.

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