Accent reduction: What are the benefits of improving your accent?
Be better understood by others...Speaking with a heavy accent can make it difficult for others to understand you. Further, when they have to ask, "Excuse me?" or "What did you say?" it takes time and energy. They are likely to lose patience and look for ways to end the conversation. Accent reduction can help you be better understood!
Be more self-confident...Even if you are a naturally self-confident person, you may be self-conscious at some level about your accent. This fear may keep you from speaking up in public, standing up and stating your ideas, and taking charge when the opportunity arises. Don't let your accent keep you from being the most effective and confident person you can be.
Command the attention of an audience...Judy Ravin, author of Lose Your Accent in 28 Days, recently had a client come to her and ask for help losing his accent after a very disturbing event. He was speaking before an audience of 1,000 at a major high tech industry conference. After about 5 minutes, he noticed that the audience was starting to look bored. A couple of minutes later, several audience members escaped to the exits. After 15 minutes, just halfway through his talk, about 25% of the audience was gone! He was an expert on the topic at hand — so it wasn't the actual content he was delivering. It was the delivery itself. His accent got in the way of what might have been a very successful talk!
Be an "insider" in your organization...Foreign accents unfortunately make some people "outsiders" in their organizations. People immediately know you're from somewhere else. This makes you different than others. Of course, being different can be great and may actually attract people to you. But you don't want it to be an excuse for some in your organization to label you as an outsider and treat you as if you don't quite belong. We've seen this unfortunate tendency time and again. It's lousy, but it's a reality in many organizations.
Improve your social life...Speaking more clearly and being better understood will make people more likely to want to engage in conversation with you. Barriers are lowered and communication flows more naturally. You spend less time repeating yourself and clarifying points and more time exchanging ideas.
The following is an excerpt from a BusinessWeek magazine article:
JOB-SEEKERS' TIP: LOSE THE ACCENT
CAN SOMEONE'S ACCENT affect the type of job they get? In recent years, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has increasingly been asked to rule on accent discrimination--usually in cases dealing with immigrants. Now comes word that even for native-born speakers, having an accent can hurt job opportunities.
The evidence? In a recent experiment, two researchers at the University of North Texas asked human resource directors to listen to identical recorded passages of text spoken in different U.S. regional accents--and then recommend the best type of job for the speaker. Researchers Patricia Cukor-Avila and Dianne Markley found that job-seekers with identifiable accents, such as a heavy Southern drawl, were more often recommended for lower-level jobs that offer little client or customer contact, such as support positions. Those with a less identifiable accent, such as that found in the Midwest, tended to get recommended for higher-contact, higher-profile--and often higher-paying--jobs in public relations and marketing.
The following is an excerpt from a New York Times article:
UNCLEAR ON AMERICAN CAMPUS: WHAT THE FOREIGN TEACHER SAID
By Alan Finder
Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.
The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.
"He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,' " said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. "But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English."
