Foreign scholars seek to lose accents in Mo. program

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Myongchee Choi came to the University of Missouri-Columbia ready to conquer the campus.

The 36-year-old visiting scholar, an urban planner and local government official from Ansan, South Korea, has studied and practiced English for more than two decades. Once she arrived, Choi quickly realized that textbook English doesn't take you very far in the linguistic melting pot that is mid-Missouri.

"They just taught us grammar and how to read," said Choi, who has adopted the first name of Clara while studying at Missouri. "They never taught us how to speak and how to listen."

So Choi, in an effort to lose her heavy Korean lilt, enrolled at her own expense in the university's "accent modification" program, where she worked with speech therapists who normally deal with stroke victims and childhood stutterers.

Missouri has long offered such programs to nonnative speakers, but funding shortfalls limited the sessions to only one or two foreign students or visiting scholars each semester, said Dana Fritz, a clinical instructor at the university's Speech and Hearing Clinic who oversees the program.

Earlier this year, the campus Asian Affairs Center reached out to Fritz in an effort to expand the clinic's reach. A group of 16 visiting scholars from China and Korea recently completed the program, with dozens more on a waiting list.

"We are not in the business of making accents go away, but trying to help people really improve how they're understood," Fritz said.

For Choi and the other participants, that meant exercises such as looking in a mirror, mouth agape, to see how their tongues form certain sounds.

They worked on consonant formation, vowel articulation, stress patterns, proper pauses, intonation and pitch -- basic aspects of speech that most native speakers take for granted.

In essence, participants have to unlearn the techniques by which they originally learned to speak English, Fritz said.

"So much of that is inside you, it's hard to take out," she said.

At many universities, including the University of Missouri, an increase in foreign-born graduate students teaching large undergraduate lectures has led to minimum language proficiency requirements.

Like Choi, visiting Korean scholar Ji-Wook Kim, a government procurement officer in the Chungnam province, isn't spending his time in Missouri as a classroom teacher. But he too quickly realized that the English he hears on campus bears faint resemblance to what he learned back home.

"We think we speak English," he said. "But Americans don't know what we're saying."

Accent modification students work one-on-one with other graduate students in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders, who tailor the sessions to each student's needs.

For Choi, that meant encouragement to "growl like a dog" while working to enunciate the words in the Langston Hughes poem, "A Dream Deferred" during a session in early May.

Kim, meanwhile, spoke into a computer microphone that measured his voice's pitch and intonation, producing a mathematical curve that compared his results with those of a native English speaker.

In Missouri, University of Missouri system curators and state lawmakers established standards 20 years ago for public universities that require graduate teaching assistants for whom English is a second language to pass a combination of tests: an Educational Testing Service exam known as the SPEAK test, and a five-minute oral presentation before a grading panel that includes two undergraduates.

Referrals to the accent modification program are reserved for those graduate teaching assistants who need additional remedial work, said Michael Volz, coordinator of the University of Missouri's international teaching assistant program.

Those graduate students can also pursue additional classroom work, including an American phonetics course offered by the Department of Communication Science and Disorders, he said.