Thinking About Speaking:
The Adastra Approach to Mastering the American English Accent
Adastra Speech is dedicated to helping individuals improve their American accent and overall vocal expression.
Dr. Christi Barb's book, 'Thinking About Speaking: The Adastra Approach to Mastering the American Accent,' lies at the core of her method.
This book details a research-based approach to refining spoken English communication skills for both non-native speakers and teachers of English language learners who want to go beyond surface-level pronunciation drills and explore the deeper cognitive aspects of speech learning and teaching.
Who It's For
Teachers - English as a Second Language, Speech-Language Pathologists
Anyone who wants to learn how to teach advanced ESL speakers.
Anyone curious about what accent modification is, who chooses to do it, how it works.
Non-native speakers of American English who...
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Know and have spoken English for years (are proficient) but want to work on the details to improve their speech.
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Feel they have been stuck at the same level for a long time and want to know why and how to change.
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Reached a level of career success and want to take their speech to a higher level.
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Want to continuously improve their performance.
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Are curious about the rationale behind typical spoken English exercises. These people ask “why?” when told how to do something.
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Have been confused about where to start and what order to work on things.
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Have tried other methods to improve their speech but haven’t found what they needed. This book will show them what’s been missing from other methods.
What You'll Gain
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Gain insight into what creates an accent, demystify “foreign accent,” and the most current method that goes beyond pronunciation.
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Leave with a new understanding of what accent modification is, who it is for, and what realistic outcomes are.
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Learn why traditional teaching methods don’t take ESL speakers to the highest level of speaking skills possible.
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Understand the rationale and research behind each step of the accent modification process.
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Discover specific examples of how real people made progress in a variety of ways
FAQ's
Answers from the book:
What makes the most difference in being understood easily?
The answer is prosody.
What is prosody?
Prosody is the term that includes several aspects of speech that aren't the pronunciation of individual sounds. Prosody includes:
Intonation - The change of pitch (how high or low in Hz) in a sentence that emphasizes important words.
Word Stress - The vowel in the stressed syllable of a word is higher in pitch and longer in duration than the unstressed syllables.
Pauses - The placement and duration of pauses within and between sentences.
Pace - The rate of speech, how fast or slow words are spoken in sentences.
Rhythm - Overall, rhythm is a combination of all of the above features.
Isn't pronunciation important to be understood clearly?
Yes, pronunciation is important and can have a huge impact on being understood.
However, it is possible to pronounce all the sounds of English very well and still be misunderstood.
What is the goal of accent modification?
Each person has their personal goals when it comes to making changes to how they speak.
In general, the goal of accent modification is to improve comprehensibility and communication effectiveness.
Comprehensibility is defined by how easily and accurately the listener receives the intended message conveyed by the speaker.
This is different than intelligibility because you can understand the words someone is saying due to good pronunciation, but still not understand their meaning.
If someone is comprehensible, their meaning is easy to understand without a lot of effort by the listener.
There's so much to learn and practice. Where should I start?
Start with prosody. Prosody uses less memory and has the biggest impact on being easily understood.
Our brains don’t have the ability to quickly access an infinite amount of information that has been stored—there are capacity limits. How much the brain can process at one time is called “cognitive load” but could casually be referred to as “brain space.”
One way to free up cognitive load is to focus on the speech features that don’t demand such a heavy load. That would be working on prosody (the “music” of a language) as opposed to pronunciation of individual sounds.
The goal is to free up space in the memory to access what has been learned about how to say something at the same time as remembering what to say.
It’s motivating to begin making improvements to prosody before progressing down to the fine details of pronunciation. You’ll be able to maintain your progress with prosody as you add on more and more to hold in your memory.
How do you measure progress?
Your progress in each speech feature can be observed in: awareness, control, and analysis.
Awareness: Can you hear it? (the feature we are focusing on)
Control: Can you produce it? Can you make your voice do what you want it to do? Can you match a target sound/feature? Can you create the meaning you want?
Analysis: Can you identify if you matched the target sound/feature? Can you identify how to make corrections if needed?
Everyone makes progress at different rates on each speech feature, such as going higher in pitch for emphasis or stretching the vowels longer in stressed syllables.
Progress is also measured through the amount of structured practice, from most structured (imitation) to less structured (reading), to no structure (conversation).