Ummm... happy new year! And thanks a lot for being here with me today on this new year's

day.

I hope you've had a good celebration and I really appreciate you spending your time here

with me today.

Umm... in case we haven't met before, my name is Sheri Summers and I work with people who

would like to improve their pronunciation and their accent in English and today, I'm

going to go over some things about... some things that I've learned over the years of

what people have in common when they are trying to learn a new language, trying to learn a

new accent.

Let me tell you a little bit more about myself.

I've been working with people for many, many years as I've said. I started out in middle

school, probably like a lot of you, learning a foreign language and I found that I loved

it and so I wanted to try another wanted to try another and I really love language enough

that I decided that I wanted to teach English and since then, I've been teaching English

to probably thousands and thousands of people since I got started about... I don't know,

20-25 years ago.

And eventually, I started thinking that a lot of the people who I work with could speak

English pretty well, but they were not necessarily sounding very good or they were embarrassed

because of their speech. And a lot of the students would come to me. My students would

come to me and they would say, "How do I pronounce this?" Or "What am I dong wrong here?" And

as an English teacher, I tried to help them as much as I could, but it wasn't always easy

because to be honest, English teachers are not really trained very much in pronunciation

and accent.

We learn all about grammar and vocabulary and all of those things that you probably

learned when you were in school but not so much on pronunciation and accent. So, I made

it my goal to be able to find out how to help my students better, and because of that I

developed a course, which some of you know about. The American Accent Course, and I've

been working strictly with pronunciation and accent for the last about 7 years.

So today on this great new year's day, what I would like to do is talk to you about some

of the things that I've noticed as I've been working with people for the past 20 something

years and in particular the past 7 or so years, and tell you what I've been able to see with

people who speak English very well. So I've noticed some tendencies that people have and

I've been thinking about this lately and I thought this would be a really good thing

to share.

So I'm going to take a little bit of time and go over 7 different traits I can think

of that almost everybody has who sounds really good in English. And I'm not sure if they

will surprise you or not, but I'll go over those. And when we're finished, I'll answer

any questions that you have. So if there's something in particular that you would like

to talk to me about, then put that into the chat box, you should be able to see that on

the right side here, and I will try to answer your question.

So, let me show you some slides uh... about, what we're talking about regarding the 7 traits

that people have. And this is what I call non-native speakers, what they do, to sound

like native speakers. Now I don't mean you have to sound exactly like a native speaker.

That's really not the case. You really don't have to sound exactly like a native speaker,

but what umm... what I am trying to aim at is helping people feel a lot more comfortable

with speaking and everyday situations. I know from myself when I've been overseas speaking

another language, sometimes I get really embarrassed when I make a mistake. So I wanna go through

some of these things that will maybe help you do a little bit better job at speaking

more smoothly.

What non-native English speakers do to sound like native speakers and how you can do it

too. So let me go and show you the first thing here. This is the first quality that I've

noticed in near-native English speakers and I call them near-native English speakers because

you don't have to sound exactly like a native English speaker unless maybe you are an actor,

so if you're an actor, you probably need a little more specialized help.

So near-native English speakers recognize how their language differs from English. Now

let me explain this a little bit. When we're born, we are able to recognize,

we would be able to say any possible sound that there is in the world when we're born.

Obviously, it takes a couple of years to get that, but we are able to use any language,

any sound. So when you're a young child, you could pick up the Chinese tones for example,

which I can't really do. You could pick up the Kalahari clicks, you know... that they

use in South Africa or in the Kalahari Region. You could pick up the French R or the English

TH. It doesn't really matter because umm... you can pick up anything. So when you're young,

you are able to pick up anything that is out there that humans are able to do.

What happens though is that after a time, as we get older, we start losing that ability.

We use particular sounds, we hear particular sounds -- the sounds from our own language

and we develop this small, little, compact -- what I call, your personal sound bank.

Maybe they are the 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 different sounds that you use in your own language.

It's the rhythms, and the intonation, and the ups and the downs or the tones or whatever

your own language has and this is your personal sound bank. Which is great because this is

what you need to communicate with.

Why bother learning thousands of different sounds if you don't use them. So, you've got

all of these sounds in your personal sound bank based on your own native language. Which

is great until you start learning another language.

So, you learn another language and you may not realize that this second language has

different sounds. There are things that might be similar to what is in your own language,

but there are things that are quite different. And sometimes, to be honest, we just don't

even recognize them. We don't even hear them. That's because we're not aware. We're not

aware of how different something should be. So here's some things about this:

Uh... you're born with the ability to, when you're born, you can learn any sound there

is. But soon, you develop your personal sound

bank. And to be honest, what happens is, you're not able to use... whoops! Let me do this...

personal sound bank.

To be honest, what happens after that is you umm... you don't really have the ability anymore

because you become deaf to new sounds.

So when you were learning English, and for a lot of us, it's back in middle school, let

me ask you: did your teacher speak a lot to you?

Did your teacher have a native sound? A native English sound? Chances are that was not true.

And so if your teacher did not have a native sound and probably didn't even recognize what

different sounds were available to them, they definitely were not able to pass that along

to you.

So near native speakers realize, and you now know too that your native language has sounds

that are different from English. Some of them will be the same. Some of them will be very

similar, and some of them will be different. So you have to recognize that there are new

things that you may not be aware of. Alright, so that's our first thing.

Let's go over here and take a look at the next one. By the way, if you're not able to

see something. If you're not able to see the board or hear me ok. Umm... send me a message

and I'll see if I can get it worked out. So here's the second thing, and this is really

really important, obviously. Near native English speakers take acton to find out what they

are missing from their personal sound bank.

Alright, you already know that if you speak English or whatever language as a second language,

you're probably missing some things from your sound bank, which is perfectly natural and

perfectly ok. So what you're probably doing is you're using the sounds that you're already

familair with in your native language, and you're putting it into English.

And that's how we can tell, "oh, he has a Spanish accent. She has a Russian accent."

That's because we can sometimes recognize that these sounds are different from what

we are used to.

So, no problem with it -- nothing wrong with it at all, but, there's just some sounds that

are not being used and so, most likely, you would use a sound from your native language.

So let's find out what we're missing from our sound bank. Now if you're doing this alone,

it's not always really easy to do, mainly because we're not always aware of what we're

missing.

Sometimes we are, but sometimes we're not and awareness is very, very important. If

you're not aware of something, it just doesn't exist for you. So we're not aware.

So, there are three things that we can do. Number one, and this just depends on you:

if you have a really good ear, you may be able to recognize some of these things and

some people do have a really good ear. Some people are able to hear it and figure out,

"wait a minute, that's new, I haven't heard that before." Particularly people who are

musicians, they tend to have a really good ear. People who are very verbal, very vocal.

People who are very auditory, they like to listen. So if you are this kind of person,

you might have a really good ear and you may be able to hear things that you weren't aware

of before.

So that's one thing. The second thing you can do is you can ask a friend or somebody

close to you who speaks English as a first language to correct you.

Okay? This is okay, this works sometimes. Um... your friend, if they're a native English

speaker, they'll be able to recognize when you make a mistake and hopefully, they'll

be able to point it out when there is a mistake that goes on. The problem with this though

is a couple of things.

Sometimes they don't feel that it's very polite. So for example, maybe you'll make a mistake

and they'll think, "Oh, I don't wanna, I don't wanna stop this conversation. I don't want

to be rude and point something out. And that's uh... you may know what I'm talking about.

You may have a friend or somebody that you work with who you say, "could you please point

out things, point out mistakes to me."

And they will, they'll try to do it, but they feel a little bit embarrassed about it. But

hopefully, you have a good enough relationship with somebody where they can recognize things

and they can point it out.

But then there's another problem. Umm... if you're working with a friend or somebody close

to you who can point things out. Sometimes, actually, usually, they can't tell you how

to correct your mistake. They'll tell you what it should sound like, but they won't

necessarily tell you how to do it. So umm... well, just say: they can't make corrections

sometimes. Maybe they'll say, "no, it should sound like this," but for you, it sounds the

same as what you've been saying. Maybe you can't hear the difference and they don't know

how to tell you how to make the corrections.

Actually, this is where I was at years ago when my students would come to me and they

would say, "how do I pronounce this?" Or "what's the difference between this and this?" Basically,

I would say, "repeat after me." And you know what? It didn't always work. Sometimes it

worked, but it didn't always work because they couldn't really hear what I was doing.

They didn't know what to do with their tongue, with their lips. They didn't know how to make

the sound. Sometimes, especially if they had a good ear, they could pick some of that up,

but not always. So I, at that time, couldn't make corrections and often that's what will

happen with your friends is they won't be able to help you make the correction or help

you see exactly what the error is, because you might have, you know, this kind of pronunciation

deafness.

Okay and well uh... the third thing, and you can probably figure this out, that what you

could do to help you become aware of these other sounds and add them to your personal

sound bank is to get specialized training.

Okay, and uh... so this is what I did years ago, is I actually got specialized training,

so I could turn around and give specialized training to my students. and believe me when

I went through the process, it was ummm... it was very interesting.

I started noticing things in my own native language, English, that I had never, ever

thought about before. And I felt like it was quite a journey for me to learn all of the

little things that really go on in English that I hadn't thought about and probably your

friends hadn't thought about.

So I started getting the specialized training and uh... and started learning how to help

people fix some of the things they were doing. How to adjust your tongue, how to adjust your

sound. How to use the rhythms and the ups and the downs. And uh... and eventually, I

was teaching a lot of people and then I created the course that in fact, I can show this to

you right now. See, if you look over on the right side, you'll be able to see, uh... one

second, this is a kind of a new system for me, so I'm just getting it all figured out.

Yeah, you'll be able to see the American Accent Course. Umm... if you click on that, well,

actually, I think what I'll do is I'll tell you more about it in just a few minutes. But

I have created this American Accent Course and I created it online because I wanted it

to be available to people all over, not just the people who happen to live near me in California.

So, this kind of specialized training really makes a difference. Number one because we