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CDS offers accent-reduction course
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“I’ve had people come in that have said that they just plainly aren’t understood by others, and it’s a burden to them or a hurdle for them in one way or another.”
Theresa Cinotti, a clinical assistant professor at UB’s Speech-Language and Hearing Clinic, finds accented English beautiful. An accent, she says, is something distinct and individual, a clue to a person’s rich culture and heritage.
And yet, for the past five years, Cinotti has been helping members of the UB and Buffalo community reduce their accents through a semester-long course the clinic offers. While it pains her at times to hear her clients’ accents disappearing, she knows that, ultimately, the 13-week Compton P-ESL class she coordinates helps them.
“I’ve had people come in that have said that they just plainly aren’t understood by others, and it’s a burden to them or a hurdle for them in one way or another,” Cinotti says.
Participants in the program, which is open to UB students for $370 and all other participants for $445, have included bankers, scientists and company executives looking to advance their careers. Students training at the clinic to become speech-language pathologists also have taken advantage of the course. One visiting instructor who took the class to bolster his chances of getting a full-time job in academia later landed a position at Harvard University.
Cinotti says the class fills up, though the clinic rarely advertises it. Students often learn about the offering by word of mouth, typically through past participants, such as Janice Lu, a native of China studying to become a speech-language pathologist. Lu, whose first language is Cantonese, says the Compton P-ESL program has improved her ability to produce sounds, including the “L” at the end of words such as “girl,” and the “ow” sound in words such as “brown.” For the UB graduate student, pronunciation that matches standard American English is critical.
“If I want to work with people with speech disorders, I have to demonstrate the correct way to produce the sounds,” Lu says. “I need to be a model and teach them how to adjust the positions of their articulators.”
The Speech-Language and Hearing Clinic, part of the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, has offered the accent-reduction course each semester since fall 2005 after Cinotti and fellow faculty member Donna Ringholz traveled to New Orleans to receive training in administering the program. The non-credit course begins with evaluations, during which Cinotti and graduate students working at the clinic analyze clients’ speaking patterns to determine how they can best improve their pronunciation.
In small groups of two to five, participants practice in class for an hour each week, with each individual working on words, sentences and paragraphs that contain the specific sounds he or she is learning. Cinotti and her graduate students demonstrate and give clients advice on where to position their tongues and jaws—“subtle things that they might not know how to alter without help,” Cinotti says.
“If a sound is not in a person’s first language, there’s a very good chance that the person is not even perceiving that the sound exists,” she adds. “So we work on developing the perception of the sound first.”
At home, clients continue honing their skills for at least an hour each day, recording and listening to their own speech. A CD-ROM they receive contains demonstrations and instructions on how to pronounce target words. Besides training to reduce their accents, clients also learn how to interpret and respond to common expressions as simple as, “What’s up?” Cinotti encourages participants to bring questions to class about phrases they hear or see that they don’t recognize or fully understand. Sometimes, the words or expressions are so complicated—one chemist asked how to pronounce chemical compounds—that Cinotti and her colleagues must look up the standard American English pronunciation before demonstrating.
And that’s not the only time, Cinotti says, that she and the graduate student clinicians who help run the program are the ones who are learning.
“I’ve just enjoyed working with all the people who have committed to the program. One of the things that has been great is learning about all their cultures,” Cinotti says. “Usually, the clients or students in the group really bond. Often times, they are so supportive of each other. They feel comfortable—they all have something in common. As clinicians, we learn so much because of the openness, the sharing of cultures and backgrounds.”
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