Accent “Reduction”* (Accent Expansion)
*The reason I’ve starred the phrase “accent reduction” above is because everyone has an accent, including native English speakers. When a client comes to me because they would like to speak English with an accent that is closer to a native North American English speaker’s, what we’re doing in therapy together isn’t reducing an accent — rather, it’s expanding their repertoire to include speech sounds from the North American English accent. They end up with more speech sounds that they are able to produce, not less. For this reason, I think it’s more accurate and prefer to use the more recent term in the field, accent expansion.
Regardless of the term we use to describe it, people who have a non-North American English accent sometimes wish to modify their accent, in order to be understood more clearly by colleagues or friends, or because they would like to feel more comfortable when interacting with North American English speakers. Whatever your reason, if you’re interested in modifying your accent, a speech evaluation can help identify the speech sounds and intonation patterns that are unique to your accent, select goals that fit with your communication needs, and then support your development of new skills to help meet those goals.
Examples of goal areas we might work on together:
- Learning how to produce a new speech sound at the sentence level
- Increasing consistency of a target sound during conversation
- Practicing the stress patterns of multisyllabic vocabulary words within your field
- Role-playing functional communication situations (e.g. ordering at a cafe) with focus on a target sound
Frequently Asked Questions
about Accent Expansion:
- Will I end up speaking English just like a native speaker?
Unfortunately, this is not something I can promise. Everyone has different linguistic backgrounds and influences, as well as other individual factors, which can affect to what extent they are able to speak English with a North American English accent. However, most accent clients I work with, who dedicate time and effort to practicing the skills introduced in our therapy sessions, achieve notable progress towards their goals.
- My insurance only covers $500. How much progress can I expect to make with that amount of coverage?
$500 in coverage means that our time together will be quite limited. If you’re planning to only use the insurance coverage to fund your sessions, it’s great if you share this with me at the start, as it will help me to determine the scope of our sessions together. Likely, I’ll pick just one or two goals that I think we’ll be able to see some progress on in the short time we have together.
