There are many benefits to accent reduction training: increased confidence in your speech, an improved ability to communicate your ideas, and conversations that are no longer interrupted by “Could you please repeat that?”. The benefits of accent reduction do not end just with you though, they transfer over to the people that you are communicating with as they will now have a much greater ability to understand you. It is important for me to communicate that your accent is not a bad thing, but it can impact your life in a negative way if it is preventing you from reaching your goals. Through accent reduction training, you will not just be able to speak more clearly, but you will learn how to hear sounds that you previously could not distinguish, and to form those new sounds as well; this is how we will work to modify your accent, along with a focus on suprasegmental features of speech, such as prosody, intonation and stress use. To break it down further, an English accent is simply standard American English being filtered through your native language, sometimes resulting in a mispronunciation of certain sounds, and often using the rhythm and stress patterns of your native language. During our sessions, I will help you to retrain the muscles in your mouth, as well as your ear, so that you can speak more clearly and in a more fluid manner, much more so like a native speaker of the language.