Accent Reduction: Top–BEST– Strategies for HOW to Learn Accurate, Clear English

These are strategies that work for both efficient and quick and also long lasting change:

• It takes 70 days of practice every day to change habits– in this case, from accented English to clear easy to understand American English.  That is 10 weeks of learning.
• Do  a full diagnostic assessment to know what you already know, such as  accurate speech sounds, and to know what your errors are.  That way you can focus on what you need to change.  That’s efficient learning!
• Do daily practice of a minimum 5 days a week, at least 30 minutes of English speaking exercises. To get long lasting change in speech patterns means engraining movement memory in your brain and muscles.
• Take every opportunity  in daily life to practice the skills for clear English pronunciation and other intelligibility skills.  This way you learn to adjust your mouth movements (tongue, lips, teeth, jaw) and loudness of your voice to the circumstances.  And you learn to think and talk clearly at the same time.
• Use clear talking visual learning and visual models (for example, video lessons using a human teacher not cartoons or drawings)  in addition to voice only recorded lessons to give you the biggest gain. Positioning of the tongue, lips, teeth and jaw for accurate English sounds is critical. Wrong position, wrong sound. Speech sounds too quick or too slow for American English means wrong speech sound.
• Get periodic checks from experienced teacher to be sure you are using your speech muscles in exactly the right way.  For most people, once or twice in a week feedback during coaching works perfectly.
• Get specific training advice on exactly what to do with your speech muscles.  Remember, it is not practice makes perfect, but perfect practice makes perfect.

Remember that neuroscientists report it takes 1000 times of doing a new skill to form a mental trace in your brain and 10,000 practices to make that new learning a long lasting habit.

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.