Accent Reduction Classes

As a U.S. inhabitant with an accent, I was intrigued to see a workshop being offered in the Continuing Studies Curriculum at Stanford on Accent Reduction for Non-Native Speakers of English.  The workshop description is as follows:

"This workshop is designed for individuals who are already proficient in English, but who would benefit from reduction of their foreign accent. It provides an approach to accent reduction that is systematic yet not overly technical. Key concepts will be introduced and then applied to language-specific pronunciation issues. Special emphasis is placed on practical exercises that will serve as a guide for continued improvement after the workshop is over. Topics covered include: a quick, basic, and useful introduction to where and how speech sounds are produced; individual sounds of American English in isolation, with close attention to typically problematic consonants and vowels; difficult combinations of sounds; word stress; intonation; and pronunciation differences between formal and casual speech. Each topic is accompanied by practical exercises and feedback throughout the workshop."

(From Stanford Continuing Studies Catalogue)

I have never seen these kinds of workshops offered before by universities and was wondering if there is a high demand for them and what the target market is eg professionals?  blue color workers?  parents dealing with unfamiliar school systems?

And I may just have to take issue with the first sentence of the workshop description where it refers to individuals who are 'proficient in English' but who would 'benefit from a reduction of their foreign accent'.  To my mind, it is the Americans who have the 'foreign' accents if the baseline is being 'proficient in English'!  (And that's tongue in cheek for anyone who wants to complain ....)

Comments

[Steven Lubet]

In the early 1990s, Mari Matsuda had a piece in the Yale Law Journal about accent discrimination. Apparently, it is still with us.

[John Steele]

I'm really glad you mentioned this.

I've taught public speaking at law schools several times and this issue has always come up. In fact, it usually came up multiple times per semester. The students would often approach me privately and dance around the issue a little bit until we could have a discussion about it. If my experiences are at all common, then whether or not the students in your class mention it, there are some who are worrying about it. The issue also came up in trial advocacy classes.

I eventually decided that I needed to throw in a quick reference to the possibility in the intro class because there were enough students for whom it was an issue. Obviously, it's a delicate issue, especially when the teacher has the demographic profile that I have. So my strategy was to mention casually that two white male partners I know, both born in the US and who speak with "US-born" accents, had decided to work on their accents for professional reasons. I mention that that's a hugely personal if not political choice with all sorts of implications but if any students want to talk about it, they can look it up themselves or speak to me. There are always some who do.

Having taken Stanford CSC courses myself, my sense is that that course is geared to non-US born people who were drawn to Silicon Valley and who are worried about the effectiveness of their professional speaking in the Valley. (As you may know, there are plenty of people out there who make a living in the field of "accent reduction.")

[Joseph Blocher]

I don't have any experience with foreign accent reduction classes, and haven't seen them advertised. But when I was growing up here in North Carolina, there were plenty of programs and teachers available to help people (mostly children, I think) lose their *Southern* accents. The target audience seemed to be parents who were worried that a Southern accent - and/or accompanying diction - would hold their kids back academically and professionally.

[Ann Marie Marciarille]

I'm guessing the target market is foreign born graduate students who will be teaching assistants for undergraduate classes. You can read here about how much campus controversy has arisen around this: http://www.frontpagemilwaukee.com/site/Viewer.aspx?iid=17888&mname=Article. There are many many many such articles.

[Ahmad Baeg Chughtai]

My first question would be, which American accent will they teach? Personally I would love to learn the Louisiana accent... even though many feel it is unsophisticated, I think it's really cool. I would not want to learn the "Kennedy" though.