With the expansion of the global marketplace, a new branch of ESL training known as accent reduction or accent neutralization is beginning to emerge. Accent reduction is being driven by what is known in the business world as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), which is the outsourcing to third party service providers of business processes such as customer service and technical support. BPO, which is implemented as a cost-saving measure, usually involves moving the outsourced business processes to 3rd world countries where the cost of labor is much lower than in the country where the company is headquartered. The purpose of accent reduction is to help people who are already proficient in English to speak with a more North American or British accent.

India is one of the most popular countries for business process outsourcing because it has a large number of highly educated English speakers. These Indians often speak excellent English, but many of the customers they speak to have difficulties understanding them due to their heavy accents. This is where accent reduction comes into play.

Two of the principle keys to sounding like a native English speaker is to master the way they use stress and intonation.

One of the difficulties many foreign speakers of English have is the way native speakers stress certain syllables and words while not stressing others. English is considered to be a “stressed” language, whereas languages such as French and Italian are considered to be “syllabic” languages. In syllabic languages, each syllable receives equal importance. Some syllables are stressed more than others, but each syllable has its own length. But in English, words that are not stressed tend to be spoken so quickly that often they are not heard at all.

Kenneth Beare gives the following example to illustrate this in his article, “Intonation and Stress, Key to Understanding and Being Understood”. The model verb “can” is normally not stressed as in the following sentence:

They can come on Friday. (stressed words underlined)

But the negative form of the verb (“can’t”) tends to be stressed, as in:

They can’t come on Friday.

The second sentence takes longer to say than the first because both “can’t” and “come” are both stressed.

So, one thing that needs to be understood by foreign speakers in order to reduce their accent is which words are generally stressed by native speakers and which ones are

unstressed, and glided over. The general rule of thumb is that native speakers stress content words such as nouns, principal verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Function words such as determiners, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns do not receive stress.

Thus, in working to reduce accent, the speaker doesn’t have to be concerned with pronouncing every word clearly (native speakers certainly don’t). Rather they should concentrate on pronouncing the stressed words clearly and correctly.

What about intonation? Ann Cook, in her book American Accent Training, recommends the use of staircase intonation. For example, take the sentence, “Bob is on the phone.”

The first word “Bob” is said with a high intonation, then each successive word is said with a progressively lower intonation. The last word in the sentence “phone”, a stressed word, will be said with the same intonation as the first word of the sentence “Bob”.

To use staircase intonation, as you say your words, imagine that they are bounding lightly down a flight of stairs. Every so often, one jumps up to another level, and then starts down again. Start a new staircase when you want to emphasize a word, generally a noun.

Stress and intonation are the keys to excellent pronunciation and understanding of English. They are the aspects of speaking to focus students on who are working to reduce their accent. The other key to speaking English like a native is the same as the key to becoming an expert at anything: practice, practice, practice!

Leonard Bogle