FAQS

  • Is this speech therapy?
    • I am also a licensed and ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist, but no, accent modification is not speech therapy. Your accent is not a disorder, I am not treating you as a patient. My education in speech-language pathology has provided me with tools that enhance my speech training with non-disordered clients. This includes conducting comprehensive evaluations, writing goals, tracking progress, progressing toward goals at the right pace and with the right targets, modifying my methods according to your needs and skills, and understanding how the various systems of the body work to make people produce and understand speech.

  • Will insurance cover this?
    • No. Because this is not therapy, it is not a reimbursable medical service. However, if you believe that this work will help you do your job better, talk to your employer about using professional development funds to pay for your training. Many employers will help pay for these services. I can provide invoices for this purpose.

  • How is culturally sensitive accent training different?
    • There are a few differences between my training and how accent training is sometimes done:
      • I don’t decide alone what you need to work on. I can identify what aspects of pronunciation might help you be understood better, but we decide together what targets help you meet your goals.
      • I don’t aim for perfection. The purpose isn’t to make everyone think you’re a native speaker. That is for actors. It’s okay for you to still have a foreign accent if people understand you. In fact, improving clarity while staying true to your own accent can even help others learn that skilled professionals can have all different accents and language backgrounds.
      • I am sensitive about the words I use and how it might perpetuate bias or cultural supremacy. I will never tell you that the way you say something makes you sound uneducated or less competent.
      • We can talk about other things besides pronunciation. Sometimes other factors hinder connection, like body language, rate of speech, and cultural factors. We also talk about skills like how to repair communication breakdowns or clarify individual words when asked.

  • What is intercultural training?
    • Communication is about more than the sounds that come out of your mouth. The way that we convey messages to others is heavily influenced by cultural values and norms. Even if you have lived outside the country of your birth for 30 years, your kids were born and raised in the US, or consider yourself a “citizen of the world,” there are undeniable ways in which our families of origin, early educational systems and popular culture tell us how to send messages--how many words to use, how far to stand from others, what order to present facts in, whom to tell the message to, and how to interpret these signals from others. You don’t have to know about all of the cultures of the world to communicate with people, but understanding the cultural influences on your own communication and being open to the possibility that communication challenges may be due to cultural influences can go a long way. We can work with both culture-specific (facts and information about a particular culture) as well as culture-general (concepts to understand culture as a whole) topics to help improve communicative effectiveness.

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