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| TELL US YOUR STORYFeatured Article
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We would like to hear from you and are very interested in the story of how you have created a successful and prosperous life in the United States.
We are featuring one such story in this issue.
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OUR PROGRAMS
Transforming
accents from
communication
barriers to
charming
cultural flavors!
Individuals-Groups
Basic Level:
Compton P-ESL
Specialized:
Medically Speaking
Regional Dialects:
Speak Standard, Too!
Advanced: MEEC and RULES for Medically Speaking
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We are passionate about helping our clients speak English clearly and with confidence! YOU CAN DO IT and we will help you! You can apply these "secrets of success."
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We at Triangle Speech Services are licensed speech-language pathologists who specialize in foreign accent and regional dialect modification. This month we are featuring an important story by a former client who is a talented research chemist from China with a remarkable hobby: ballroom dancing! He and his partner were the 2007 champion ballroom dancers in the State of North Carolina and spent many, many hours of practice preparing for this competition.
Some of our clients who are scientists, IT specialists and medical professionals, do not practice enough, as though the principles of motor skill training do not apply to them. However, Z.H. really understood the difference between being able to grasp abstract ideas quickly and easily and needing to practice systematically, slowly and repetitively to learn and habituate new movement patterns.
In response to the "secrets of success" shared by Z.H. in his story, we are sharing more "secrets" of successful practice in our article, Patience and Persistence "Pay Off".
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MY STORY by Z.H.
[ Z.H. was not only kind and friendly towards others, but also to himself. After his regular work day as a research chemist, he practiced diligently and patiently, applying the knowledge that he had learned in his ballroom dance classes of how to train movement patterns! He did not discourage himself with self-criticism but kept on practicing and noticing each small improvement.]
I still remember how excited I was about a new life in this country when I flew to the U.S. seven years ago to pursue a Ph.D. However, the reality was that my first year at the university started with a big culture shock and language challenge. I was barely able to make my classmates and teachers understand me. I never dared to ask questions and was always stressed out about class presentations.
I tried hard to solve this problem by taking ESL pronunciation classes, living with American roommates and joining a conversation group with native speakers as volunteers. However, after all these interventions, people still couldn't understand me. I heard the correct sounds but just couldn't reproduce them. I was so frustrated that I almost gave up the hope of improving my spoken English.
In 2006 I finished my Ph.D. program in Chemical Engineering and started working as an R&D engineer. I really enjoyed the work and liked my colleagues who were easygoing and fun to work with. However I felt a barrier and was not able to form any close friends. A few months later, the CEO came to me and said everyone liked my hard work and contribution to the company but many of them had a problem understanding me. He suggested that I seek some English training.
I took his advice without much confidence in the results since all my previous attempts had not been successful. This time I was lucky enough to find Triangle Speech Services and began individual training with Ms. Bergman using the P-ESL Program. She captured every subtle accent feature in my speech, and was the first teacher to give me practical and effective techniques to produce the right sounds.
I am a ballroom dance lover and have done pretty well in many dance competitions. Every week I take dancing lessons and spend quite some time practicing on my own. My dance instructor taught me that intensive, repetitive practice is an absolute requirement and Ms. Bergman made me realize this is also true for successful accent modification. I needed to make my oral muscles get used to the correct way of speaking English and do it naturally without thinking, just as my "body" muscles were trained for dancing. I told myself that if I can dance well enough to win competitions then I could certainly learn to speak English well!
Soon I was able to pronounce many words correctly, a task that had been "mission impossible" for me before. I was so excited and, most important, I regained my confidence in speaking. Motivated by my continuous improvement, I practiced intensively and even took a break from dance training to have more time to practice my speech lessons. After a few months' effort, I met with our CEO who was very pleased to tell me that he understood me 80% of the time as compared to 40% before my training. I believe it will become 100% someday!
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Patience and Persistence "Pay Off"
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 I will always remember the session when Z.H. told me, "You are telling me the same things about practicing that I hear from my dance instructor!" I asked him how many times he had to practice a new dance step with his partner in order for it to become flowing, natural and elegant. Without hesitation, he said, "At least one hundred times!"
Z.H. is a brilliant, young scientist who was hired by the CEO of a small RTP company when he had completed his doctoral research. And, being Chinese, he came from a culture that values excellence and striving for perfection. Yet he was willing to "become a beginner" and perform many, many drills in order to become comfortable producing new speech sounds like the voiced and voiceless "th" which do not exist in Mandarin. He started by repeating the sound in isolation and then slowly blended it into syllables and then repeated key words like "the," "this" "that" and "these" over and over. Then he practiced these common function words, as well as terms he used in his research, in phrases and sentences and then in carefully monitored conversation. He didn't expect that "learning about" how a sound is produced would automatically enable him to use this sound effortlessly in his conversation and he did not criticize himself for needing to practice so long and patiently. He practiced at least one hour a day, five to seven days a week, and, in the second half of the course, (after winning the championship) he discontinued his ballroom dance lessons until after he completed the P-ESL tutorial to allow for more practice time. His post testing showed, as we would expect, a very high rate of improvement.
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Click on Triangle Speech Services to visit our informative website. We also want to share our discovery of an article on the College of Charleston website, "What Causes Foreign Accents?" by Dr. Steven Weinberger, director of the linguistics program and the Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University. This is a "spoken" article with two accented speech samples which Dr. Weinberger analyzes. It is "must" reading (and listening) for American corporate managers, as well as for our "linguistically gifted" readers who speak English as their second (or third) language. And again, we hope this month's newsletter has informed and inspired you!
Sincerely,
Judith L. Bergman M.A. CCC, Founder & Director
Triangle Speech Services |
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