Education
Is your accent in English holding you back professionally? [Show summary] Esther Bruhl is a speech pathologist and founder of Speak More Clearly, an accent reduction training program for non-native English speakers. In this episode she explains how accents are formed and how new ones can be learned. Increase your marketability or productivity, by reducing your accent when speaking English [Show notes] Welcome to the 433rd episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to mention a free resource at Accepted that can benefit you if you're applying to graduate school. The challenge at the heart of admissions is showing that you both fit in at your target schools and stand out in the applicant pool. Accepted's free download, Fitting In & Standing Out: The Paradox At The Heart Of Admissions will show you how to do both. Master this paradox, and you're well on your way to acceptance. You can download your free guide at accepted.com/fiso, which stands for fitting in, standing out. It gives me great pleasure to have on Admissions Straight Talk for the first time Esther Bruhl, a speech pathologist who specializes in accent reduction for non-native English speakers. Esther is also the founder of Speak More Clearly, both the site and the YouTube channel, and I think she's the first guest we have had from down under, also known as Australia. How did you get into the accent reduction field? [1:58] I'm a speech and language pathologist. I work with children who have speech and language problems, but I also work with adults who feel they can't be clear. Another speech pathologist and I started doing groups for people face to face in our clinic a long time ago, because in Australia, like in America, there are many people who have second languages. They've come from other places. In fact, in Australia, we have over 400 other languages that other people speak. So we started this for people who were professionals, working either on the phone or other sorts of professions - lawyers, whatever. And they were feeling not confident and not good about the fact that they couldn't be understood. People had to keep asking them to repeat themselves, et cetera, which is very frustrating actually. And so we started those at a very small level and then more and more people were coming along. She pulled out, she went on to do something else, and I just continued on. The more people we had, then we realized we had to make some courses. We originally just had audio courses, but now we have video and audio, the whole shebang, online. And that's how I started, and I got more and more interested in it as I went along. I assume at this point you're mostly working with adults, no longer with children, right? [3:57] Oh no, I still do have a children case load. What causes accents? [4:09] Oh, I think this is a great question. When we're very, very young, and we start to learn language, we actually hear all the sounds that there are to make. When we babble, we babble all the sounds. All different sounds, even the ‘cha’ and ‘schm’, and any other sounds that are not in our native languages. And slowly over time, as we're learning our native language or languages, we diminish our auditory acuity for all those other sounds and only focus on the sounds that are in our native language or languages. At the same time, what we're doing is learning to move our mouth in a certain way. We organize our articulators in a certain way to only use those sounds as well, because before when we're babbling, we're saying all sorts of odd sounds that are not in our language. Slowly that takes over, and we no longer use all those other sounds and therefore we have an American accent in English, or an Australian accent in English, or whatever language we're speaking. That is partly to do with our neurological centers which are our language listening areas. So the language listening areas are very open at that po...