How to Help an ESL Student with Her Accent?

[Xenops]

My roommate moved to the U.S. from China five years ago, and she is interested in improving her English. What I wanted to help her tackle is her accent. We watched Anthony Lauder's video together, and she has enthusiastically incorporated more English music in her life.



Now how can I, a native American English speaker, help her to speak American English?

[Speakeasy]

While I cannot offer any advice, I did conduct a quick search and I located the following threads, et cetera:

Accent and pronunciation - American English
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1898

Resources for learners of "American" English?
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=76985&sid=b318d61f3b820da6f62996aeb1e5ba6d#p76985

Course on the pronunciation of English? - HTLAL
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34976&PN=26

Learn the American accent - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=learn+the+american+accent

Learn the Cockney accent with Jason Statham - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WvIwkL8oLc

My personal preference is for the Jason Statham instructional video.

Addendum: Canadian Accent
After having conducted my initial search of the language forums and of YouTube and having posted the links above, it occurred to me that your friend my wish to develop a recognizable Canadian accent ...

Bob and Doug - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Bob+and+Doug+McKenzie

Hmm, Jason Statham or Bob and Doug, Jason Statham or Bob and Doug, Jason Statham or Bob and Doug, ...?

EDITED:
Addendum

[reineke]

I am enjoying the video. The guy sure talks funny. We don't know anything about your friend except that she's from China. That's already something. Your friend's intelligibility would be my no 1 concern.

[drp9341]

accent reduction is something I specialize in. I graduated a speech therapist, and then decided to work as a language teacher and accent reduction coach instead of a speech therapist.

For east Asian students of English, (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and to somewhat lesser extent Korean and Japanese students,) even those very fluent in English, often speak too fast and don't stress any one particular word in any utterance. It's like machine gun fire speaking with no rhythm or melody. every syllable is said at equal speak and loudness

If you're roomate is already very fluent in English, then what I would recommend trying first is the following:
Find a ~5 minute long recording of a monologue by someone who she would like to sound like. Tell her to listen to that recording as many times as she possibly can without loosing her mind. Tell her to listen to it the way she would listen to a song, so that she can perfectly "sing along" in unison, (shadowing.)

This should help her get used to sentence rhythm.

Another thing: Make sure she's articulating the sound of english properly. For example, if someone makes the /t/ sound by touching the tip of their tongue all the way in their mouth, the vowel sound that follows the /t/ sound is going to sound different.

Check out this site. http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/index.html#english if you hear your roommate pronouncing any sounds incorrectly, show her this site. If she's clever, she'll be able to improve her own accent over time if she's aware of where we physically put our tongue

Introduce your student to the concept of word stress, sentence stress, and the basics of articulation. Tell her to try and copy the way Americans speak, the same way impersonators and comedians do etc. as a joke when no one is around. This practice will help her slowly approximate towards a more American accent. If there are any sounds which she still has a huge problem pronouncing, (like the /r/ sound or the "th" sound,) recommend she goes and tries seeing a speech therapist.

Also, most importantly, make sure she knows accent reduction doesn't happen overnight. Tell her to keep working on it, and that the only way she'll reduce her accent to sound more like an American is if she works on it everyday, and if YOU correct her. My girlfriend is Polish and whenever she makes a pronunciation error I'll correct her, (except if we're in some place where that may embarrass her,) and it really made huge improvements in her pronunciation.

[Xenops]

Check out this site. http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/index.html#english if you hear your roommate pronouncing any sounds incorrectly, show her this site. If she's clever, she'll be able to improve her own accent over time if she's aware of where we physically put our tongue

Thank you very much for your help, and especially to you, drp9341. I need to take your advice for myself in my target languages!

My roommate seemed excited when I showed her the video, and then...Not. The past week especially she has been watching Mandarin TV and listening to Chinese music. Today we were talking, and I invited her to my American church (she usually goes to her Chinese church). She confessed that when she talks in English one-on-one, she can understand most of the conversation; with crowds, she thinks she understands 60% at most. I encouraged her to join me tomorrow, and that the pastor speaks slowly anyway, and that it's a very cultural friendly church (we had English and Indonesian worship songs last week). Last I heard we are going together tomorrow. I also challenged her to only have English media during the week, and she confessed to listening to Chinese media because she likes having the background noise (like when doing homework), whereas with English media she feels she has to pay attention. She did say that her friend approved of learning English from me, a girl from Idaho, as opposed to someone with a Texas accent.

So that's my update on that.