What is your accent goal?

When it comes to accent modification, everyone’s goals are a little nebulous. They are a little vague, a little ephemeral. Hard to pin down. Hard to exactly define. And it’s a problem because it’s hard to know when to be satisfied, hard to know when you’ve accomplished said goal, and hard to keep track and monitor your progress.

For example. Many times, clients want to get better. They want to speak more clearly. They want to sound like a native English speaker.

But what does that mean?

How do you quantify ‘more native speaking’?

Well, there are many things that are involved. Similar to an art style or an architectural feel, there are key features or guiding principles to English speakers. Just like with art how you can tell a motif or theme, a specific use of a tool or technique, a certain focus or target of representation, there are specific themes to English.

1. The actual missing sounds

This is the one that people typically gravitate towards.

I say my R’s differently. I can’t pronounce the TH sound. They are simple to understand and typically the easiest to conceptually perceive.

Accent goals can include:

• I will reliably produce the TH-sound 95% of the time in TH-initial words (both voiced and voiceless) within 2 weeks.

• I will reliably pronounce the F-sound 95% of the time in word final position at the sentence level within 1 week.

• Those are much more measurable and objectively targetable goals.

2. The L1-L2 patterns

People will also sometimes not notice or be unaware of the patterns they apply to English that come from their native language. For example, some Spanish speakers may substitute the J and Y sounds. It’s not a missing sound but a use of their available sounds differently. Other times, it may have nothing to do with the actual sounds and more to do with their rhythm, stress, and intonation. For example, in Hebrew, my understanding is that the last syllable or second-to-last syllable are typically stressed. There is a tendency to place word stress at the end. You can imagine then when there are multisyllabic English words where stress comes at the beginning of the word, that stress patterns would change.

Accent goals can include:

• I will reliably produce the Y and J sounds in English 90% of the time in single word J and Y word-initial pairs within 2 weeks.

• I will reliably produce initial-syllable stress on multisyllabic English words accurately 80% of the time at the sentence level within 3 weeks.

3. Formality

Sometimes, there’s even a learning curve and difference between native English speakers and non-native English speakers because of the vocabulary, slang, idiom use, and turn of phrase used. Native English speakers use contraction. There is nothing wrong with saying, “Hello, how are you doing today?” but a native English speaker might say, “Sup?” or “Whaddap?” (depending on how old they are). Now, if the goal is ‘sounding more like a native English speaker’, you can quickly see that we’re getting further and further away from pronunciation now.

How do you speak to a child? How do you speak to an elder? How do you speak to your boss? And how do you speak to a friend. Native English speakers change the formality, the vocabulary, the sentence complexity, and the phrasing depending on these factors. I bet you do too in your native language, but it may not be something you think about when speaking English.

Accent goals can include:

• I will reliably recognize and use regional slang and idioms 70% of the time in structured tasks within 1 week.

• I will accurately shorten spoken and written contractions in structured tasks with 90% accuracy within 2 weeks.

4. Intonation

In English, intonation patterns are the means that native English speakers communicate emotion, ask questions, and participate in engaged conversation. In other languages, pitch variation is meaningful for the actual word to differentiate Word A versus Word B. As a result, when speaking English, nonnative English speakers’ pitch can be flat or less engaging. This means it can be boring, unengaged, or maybe when asking a question it might sound like a statement or rhetorical. This can be why some interactions may feel unpleasant. People can be interpreted as mad or serious when really, they’re just trying to communicate.

How would you communicate confidence? How would you communicate shyness? How would you communicate feeling guilty? They all manifest as changes in the way you communicate but don’t affect the pronunciation of the words.

Accent goals can include:

• I will reliably communicate a distinct emotion accurately 80% of the time in structured tasks within 2 weeks. A simple exercise would be to pick a neutral phrase “I think it’s raining outside.” and say that same phrase using 1 of 6 emotions. A native English speaker would change word stress, the rate of speech, exaggerate loudness and pitch changes to communicate those nuances in emotion.

In all the areas mentioned above, there are differences between native and non-native English speakers. And you may not necessarily achieve ‘native-like’ abilities in all of them. For example, in many situations, people don’t actually expect to enunciate or pronounce all the sounds like a native English speaker.

So define your goals.

If you have a nebulous goal of ‘sound like a native English speaker’, you may not ever be happy with your level of growth.

Unless you are an actor who needs to sound like a native from Toronto, Ontario, you may not need perfect pronunciation. If your goal is to be understood easily, does it matter that you may not use slang or contractions like a native English speaker? If your goal is to be understood easily, if a listener needs you to repeat a word 1 time instead of 5 times, is that still considered a success?

I think these are all important questions to establish your expectations. Otherwise, your accent goals might feel a little out of reach, hard to pin down, or difficult to put into words.