One of the other major areas of improvement was the accent and diction of participants. We have people from different backgrounds and geographical places. They have their north Indian / south Indian / Gujarati / Marathi accent. Many a times the pronunciation of a word is wrong and a lot of times the other person would not be able to comprehend what was spoken.
A few techniques that we used to achieve noticeable improvements:
- Speak aloud, speak in English. Your buddy will help you correct your pronunciation.
- Watch news on TV. Pick up the accent and diction from there.
- Watch news on TV. Repeat each word immediately after the newsreader speaks! This is really an exciting experiment. It not only improves the accent, it also improves confidence and concentration.
- Read an article from newspaper aloud in your team. If you make any mistake, read it again from the start.
- Focus on the problem pronunciations. Some people face difficulty speaking the last “d” in a word, especially the past tense. E.g. “dropped”. Some would pronounce it with an emphasis on “p” rather than the “d”. We worked with them on reducing this habit.
- Read more. Increase the vocabulary.
- Drop your “conjunction noise”. Many people use “um”, “aa”, “basically”, “actually”, “I mean” as conjunctions between words or sentences. We asked them to be conscious to this and drop their usage once and for all. For some, there was even a penalty of giving a chocolate to others every time they used their favorite “conjunction noise”.
The results in accent training were amazing in some cases and not too strong in some other. Accent and diction comes because of years of practice, so it would take a little while to improve on that. But what we saw, was certainly great improvement in the short time.