By Olga Smith
In my experience, the most useful strategy is to record yourself first in order to see how you sound to others. Then, identify your mistakes and correct them, practice the correct form, and then record yourself again. Repetition is the key. The reason why we have an accent is two-fold:
1. Not all English sounds exist in our native language and we are not sure how to produce them correctly.
2. Our speech organs are trained for our native language from our childhood. When we start speaking in English, we don’t place our tongue, lips, and jaw as native English speakers do.
When I recorded myself in 2004 I was shocked to realize that even I could not understand what I was saying. Then, I was looking for a speech or elocution tutor who could explain how to position your tongue, lips, and jaw for English sounds. I was lucky to find a top tutor in London and I fell in love with her method. We were practising accent reduction with funny sentences and verses, it was very enjoyable and extremely effective.
Later, together with Linda my tutor, we have published 5 books on accent reduction, which became international bestsellers. In 2009 one of the readers of our books, who was a developer contacted me and said that he absolutely loved our books and that they really worked for him. He offered to create apps based on our books and we have published 8 apps for accent reduction to date.