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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: 2008 Revision!
Specialized:
Medically Speaking
Regional Dialects:
Speak Standard, Too!
Idioms:
MIAE (Mastering the Idioms of American English)
Advanced:
MEEC (Mastering Effective English Communication)
RULES for Medically Speaking (Rules for Using Linguistic Elements of Speech)
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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 master word meanings and communicate more effectively.
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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's "My Story" article highlights the special challenges faced by individuals who are fluent in three or more languages. By "fluent," we mean that the writer and former client is accomplished enough in English and Russian, as well as his native African languages, to have obtained all of his education including his Ph.D. in the non-native languages.
In response to the anecdotes shared by Dr.A in his story, we offer a discussion of three causes of "meaning-mix-ups" and provide two excellent resources to help "cure" the confusion in our article, Meaning Mix-ups: Causes and Cures.
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MY STORY by E.A.
[E.A. has a Ph.D. earned in Oregon and is an electrical engineer from Africa. He is multi-lingual, fluent in Dangme and two other native dialects, as well as in English and Russian and has the challenge of "code switching" among the vocabularies, rhythms and sound patterns of these different languages. His story also illustrates how an overestimation of one's skill in speaking English intelligibly may be related to listeners who hesitate to give immediate feedback.]
A little bit of a background will put this story into perspective. I was born and raised in Africa and spoke a couple of local languages, the main one of which is Dangme. I started to learn English at the age of six and my high school education was entirely in English.
I spent one year at an intensive language institute studying the Russian language and obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in Russia. After working for a number of years I became a graduate research assistant in Oregon.
I always thought I spoke English well because I did not have a clue what others had to go through to properly understand me. The first glimpse of a possible problem was in Oregon, when a student wrote on a feedback form, "The instructor had a thick accent. I could not understand him." This was one student among a class of about 50 and almost all the other students in the same class gave excellent feedback. Therefore I did not give this much thought but wished that the student had not waited until the end of the ten-week course to let me know. That did not change my view that I spoke English well.
However, when I started work in my present company, it became clear that I needed help to improve my communication. My management graciously identified a nearby resource, Triangle Speech Services, and it was during the traiing with Ms. Bergman that I understood the magnitude of the problem.
I realized it was not only a matter of pronouncing words with an accent, but that there are other issues as well, relating to mixing up vocabulary from the other languages I knew. One day as I was returning to my office from a lesson, I saw a large crowd of folks outside the building. Apparently the building was being evacuated because of a fire alarm. The firemen did their work and we were allowed to enter. Shortly afterwards, two firemen came around for a final check. They were in standard uniforms similar to that of police officers and not the thick uniforms and helmets of firemen. I joked, "Will these guys be able to put out a fire in these costumes?" Everyone laughed, but one of my colleagues corrected me by saying, "Oh, you mean uniforms." I immediately understood that I was speaking a Russian word in English.
Throughout the program I improved significantly, but more importantly, I learned the tools that would help me going forward. Ms. Bergman was like a "filter trap." She caught all the accent features, not just sound distortions, but also my incorrect intonation patterns, especially in my technical and business vocabulary. On the whole the program was very useful to me.
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Meaning Mix-Ups: Causes and Cures
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 Native speakers of English are not immune to "meaning mix-ups" but these are especially challenging to multi-lingual individuals who have "internal lexicons" (dictionaries) from several languages.
Sources of Meaning Mix-Ups:
- Semantic (word meaning) and Usage Customs: We park our car in our driveway but we drive our car on the parkway! A Chinese client referred to a skating rink as an "ice house."
- Pronunciation and Spelling Interference: A client whose speech (and native language) did not have the "th" sound, read the test word "breathe" as "breeze" and composed a beautiful sentence, "I feel the soft breeze." Another client with "l" and "r" confusion pronounced "clown" as "crown" and said, "The king wears a crown."
- Commonly Confused Words: Even native speakers are very likely to confuse such similar sounding words as accept and except, affluent and effluent, allude and ellude as well as words such as number vs.amount and ability vs. capacity.
Resources for ESL and Native Speakers:
We recommend Every Day Vocabulary by Laurie Rozakis, Ph.D.published by Doubleday Direct, Inc. 1998 and the Longman Dictionary of American English, www.longman.com, with a thesaurus, grammar and writing guides and IPA symbols to explain pronunciation.
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We invite you to click on Triangle Speech Services to visit our informative website. Here is another link to a fascinating article, Do You Speak American? What Lies Ahead? 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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