AMERICAN ACCENT TRAINING AND ACCENT REDUCTION TRAINING

Learn to speak with an American Accent! SpeechCoach Company’s American Accent, Accent Reduction and American English pronunciation training is conveniently offered:

  -  at your location or at our office in Newton, MA, minutes from downtown Boston

  -  by live, online, face to face interactive classes using your computer and a web camera

  -  over the phone and by email

The goal of SpeechCoach Company's American Accent training, also referred to as accent reduction or accent modification or accent neutralization training, is to reduce -- not eliminate -- your non-native or regional American accent. Unless your profession requires you to speak with a standard American accent, during the training, we'll just focus on those aspects of your accent that create the greatest difficulty for people listening to you.

Our assessment of your voice -- conducted at our first meeting - will help us create a plan of action to address your vocal and accent reduction needs.

Accent reduction training is most effective when conducted in short meetings over a period of time. When appropriate, you'll receive audiotapes or CDs to practice vocal exercises between our meetings. Let us show you how to:

Click on Private Coaching or Group Training to learn more about the training format that's best for you.

"Each training session that you've designed over the years has generated a tangible ROI. The group and individual training sessions you provided to DataSys have helped us improve our diction, and reduce regional accents." Marcia Doron
Marketing Manager
DataSys Corporation

"I am a native Spanish speaker living in the U.S. for fourteen years, always interacting with business people from all regions of the world in a regular basis. Part of my profession involves regular public speaking in English. Even after all these years, a series of sessions on accent reduction and public speaking coaching with Janelle have improved my confidence and communication. I recommend Janelle because of her proficiency and technical approach. Janelle is highly competent, not only in language and presentation skills, but also in the difficult art of coaching itself."Ricardo Villate
Group Vice President, Latin America at IDC

"Your accent reduction training is working! People seem to have less trouble understanding me. I don't have to repeat myself as often as I used to."Simon Slaven
CTO
TheNextRound

"My training at SpeechCoach Company was very useful in developing an American accent. My opportunity for career growth has been greatly enhanced as a result of this training.

I'm from India and my accent is totally different than the American accent. Janelle Winston understands the difficulty in acquiring an American accent. She closely observed my pronunciation, including tongue and lip movement, demonstrated how to pronounce words correctly and she used various methodologies to help me pronounce the American accent correctly. The method of learning is very systematic and I believe a successful method for anyone wishing to reduce their accent.

She provided me with many practice materials and customized the coaching sessions to focus on my individual needs. She also created customized practice CDs which include words that I use at work and which provide continuous practice even after completing the course."Senthil Kumar Sankar
Assistant Project Manager
Cognizant Technologies Inc
July 2009

“I strongly recommend Janelle Winston. One of the best decisions I ever made was taking her accent reduction private coaching program. I had difficulty reducing my Chinese accent even though I have lived in the U.S. for over 14 years and have a master’s degree. I tried books, CDs, DVDs, Internet sessions, and Janelle’s program is definitely the best. Janelle customized the program for me by narrowing down my list of words to the ones that I need to practice in particular. She worked with me on every single word I made a mistake on until I could speak them correctly. Just like playing golf, I wish I can have a PGA professional to coach me for my every movement in private classes. It is the same for accent reduction. I needed the best professional to fix my pronunciation and learn the right way in one-to-one sessions.– Yiqing Wang, Software Development Technologist

"I am lucky to be one of Janelle Winston’s students.  We started with accent reduction lessons to reduce my Russian accent, but it turned out to be much more than that.  As a part of the initial evaluation, Janelle identified not only pronunciation problems to be corrected, but also areas in communication and conversation skills that needed attention.  She incorporated everything into a highly customized lesson plan with study materials tailored for my individual needs and learning style. Learning from Janelle was a highly enriching, productive and pleasant experience."- Marina Shteyngart, PPA at Staples, Inc.

"For years I believed that I spoke English correctly, and with little accent, Only after starting business school here in the US, I realized how wrong I was.I lost my confidence completely. On our first informational call, Janelle identified *ALL* my issues. Throughout our following meetings, she patiently coached me, providing me better tools for speaking the language - not an easy task when you deal with a native Hebrew speaker like myself. With Janelle's help, I improved my English, reduced my accent, and gained back my confidence."- Uriel Dabby, ClickSoftware

“I came to Janelle Winston not only because she is a good accent reduction teacher, but because she has excellent communication skills. It proved that is a definitely a right decision. Through my classes with Janelle, I was able to reduce my Chinese accent and get myself easily understood both in business meetings and social occasions. One thing I would like to emphasize is Janelle’s teach approaches. She customized my curriculum based on my needs & initial assessment at the beginning the class. As we progressed, she adjusted the focus subjects to make sure we spent the time on the most needed areas. Sometimes my schedule became crazy, we were able to have the class through Skype to keep the pace while saving the time on the road. All of these are extremely important to me as a business professional that I could get my work done and still kept learning accent reduction. Janelle also gave me some very useful tips on socializing and conversation skills. For example, I used one of the tips on a business trip with the boss to improve our relationship. I believe those skills are as important, if not more important than, the accent reduction course. And I hope to have the chance to continue learn from Janelle in the near future – Senior Marketing Manager, major Medical Devices company

"When I first came from India, I wasn't aware that my non-native tongue would make it hard for people to comprehend me. It was not until I met Janelle, I started to understand the syllables I was pronouncing wrong and articles in speech I was missing. Within a year Janelle really helped me clean up my speech and reduce my accent. Janelle is an inspirational coach. She provided me an amazing level of service, not only in person but virtually as well. Her accommodating nature made learning convenient with my travels. She is not only a great coach but an amazing trustworthy reliable person. I really enjoyed my time during coaching and she still is in contact if ever I need future professional help." - Nirav Patel, MD

"Janelle Winston masters the unique combination of language, voice, and presentation teaching techniques. I met Janelle when I was an engineering manager and struggled a lot with my Russian accent, deep voice and very modest presentation skills. However I was good at engineering and was well trained in sport. Janelle took this account to develop the right learning approach for me: we went through every vowel emphasizing the right mouth and tongue muscle movements to use for articulation and breathing techniques. It was amazing. I completely reworked the way I talked; my speech became more clear, the voice moved up and people stopped asking me twice about what I said. Janelle also helped me a lot with my presentation skills: I learned different techniques to make my point clear and loud to the audience. I've recently become a business unit director. Janelle's classes helped me a lot in my career." - Dmitri Prikhodko, RF product line director, Microsemi, CA

"As a nonnative speaker from Korea, it's not easy to speak like a native speaker in a short time, but the sessions with Janelle gave me strong momentum and a skill-set to continue improving my pronunciation. I never expected speech training to be effective but it was because Janelle gave me knowledge, the physical awareness of mouth muscles, and the right mindset. She always made me feel comfortable if I made a mistake and encouraged me so I could continue to improve. She not only taught me the right way to speak but helped me understand why I spoke a certain way so I could apply it to other similar patterns.  I also practiced my presentations with Janelle which developed my confidence so that I no longer fear speaking to a small group or a big group. And most importantly, it was always a pleasure to work with Janelle." - Marketing professional, factory automation industry

Before contacting Janelle for help, I had been teaching in a reputable business school for several years; my students liked my courses except for...my heavy Chinese accent. I had tried several accent reduction classes but none of them worked well, so I was actually quite doubtful if Janelle's training could help. In the first class, Janelle and I had a casual conversation, through which she captured a set of pronunciations that she believed I could improve relatively easily. She was right; I did make some noticeable progress in a few weeks. Then, we focused on some more difficult pronunciations that always impeded me from communicating effectively. Moreover, Janelle noticed that my problems were not only my accent, but perhaps more in my way of communicating: I tended to speak too fast and disliked eye-to-eye contact. Janelle helped me to slow down and make more eye contact during talks. These skills turned out to be very effective in making me more amiable and my talks much more understandable.

I give high marks to Janelle's accent reduction training class. This one-to-one personal training enabled customized curriculum to address my unique pronunciation and communication problems. And her warm, encouraging, and patient teaching style also has made the training a memorable experience to me. -  Assistant Professor, Massachusetts