Accent Reduction Tips The One Tip You Should Keep With You At All Times
If you learned English as a second language in your teens or as an adult, you have an accent and you always will.Eliminating your accent, though, should not be the goal in accent reduction.The purpose of accent reduction is to create effective communication; this means speech that is easy to understand by everyone without the need for repetitions.
After working with hundreds of people from around the world who speak English as a second language, I notice that most of them have one thing in common:they speak English too quickly.Many of my students tell me that they always thought they had to speak English quickly, so that they sounded fluent.This isn’t true!Speaking rate and fluency do not go hand-in-hand.Other students who have a very fast native language naturally carry over their fast speaking rate into their second language, English. Speaking quickly is not an asset, and a rapid rate does not indicate fluency in a language.I can’t stress enough that speaking quickly just means you are speaking quickly.There are no benefits to it, as far as oral communication goes.As a matter of fact, speaking quickly has many drawbacks:it will make your accent heaver, it is harder for people to process fast speech, and it is more difficult to organize your thoughts.Any way you look at it, speaking quickly is a negative.
Now that you understand that a fast speaking rate is not something you want to emulate, let’s talk about how slowly you need to speak.The answer is simple:speak as slowly as you need to in order to form sounds correctly and organize your thoughts without repeating words or adding filler words.
Speaking American English is like singing a song; words are connected together and the pitch goes up and down.You pause at various points along the way and only at appropriate times.Therefore, when you are working on speaking slowly, you need to focus on keeping your words connected, only pausing at appropriate times. Slowing down your speech is achieved by stretching out the stressed vowels in words and not by separating words.If you break the smoothness of English, then speech becomes what we call “choppy” or disconnected.
There are some accent reduction instructors who may tell you that you shouldn’t speak more slowly when speaking English.I think what they mean to say is that you want to avoid speaking too slowly and separating your words.When you think about it, if the average speaking rate for American English is only 2.5 words per second, that really isn’t that fast!Many languages are faster than this: Spanish, French, German, Indian languages, just to name a few.
So, the bottom line when it comes to speaking rate is this:stretch out the vowels in words to slow down your rate and speak only as slowly as you need in order to form sounds correctly. Keep your words connected when speaking, only pausing at appropriate times.
