It’s All a Manner of Speaking : Speech: Special classes are preparing students to sound like U.S. network newscasters.

American intolerance for accents that fall strangely on their ears has generated a recent surge in students hoping to sound like a U.S. network newscaster.

“I think there have been more requests for accent reduction work in the last decade, last five or six years,” said Roy A. Koenigsknecht, president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Assn.

Although accent training classes also are given to Americans who speak with a regional accent, speech teachers say their clients generally speak fluent English but use another language at home. Many of the students are medical, scientific and academic professionals whose jobs require a great deal of interaction with others.

Zbigniew Kabala, an assistant professor of hydrology at UC Riverside, said he decided to sign up when he had to drop a university class because he could not understand the professor’s heavy Asian Indian accent.

Even native English speakers had trouble understanding the professor, Kabala said. “They would stop the guy frequently asking him to repeat. He would get frustrated.”

Alerted to a problem he, too, might have, Kabala concluded his colleagues were too polite to correct his pronunciation. He turned to a speech professional to improve his accent.

Arthur Compton, a San Francisco speech and language pathologist, says the people he sees are “generally feeling that they’re not progressing in their career or job because of their English.”

“We tend to get people who are more insecure generally about their speech,” Compton says.

Sometimes self-consciousness persuades a middle manager to shell out hundreds of dollars for an accent training program. Other clients sign up at the suggestion or even the order of a boss.

Igal Levy, director of administration at an MCI company division, took an intensive weekend course and some private lessons at Compton’s Institute of Language and Phonology after his employer offered to pay for it.

“I was skeptical in the beginning,” he said. Twenty years after leaving Israel, he considered his English more than adequate.

“I never really felt that because I had a funny accent it held me back,” he said.

“The way it was put to me was that (there are) still some prejudices against people with accents in the business world,” Levy said.

Rather than try to change his speech patterns completely, Levy said counselor Phyllis Taylor concentrated on changing his guttural r sounds and teaching him the th sound, which does not exist in Hebrew.

“I can feel improvement if I concentrate--it’s still not automatic,” Levy said. “I’m sure that after a few beers I still sound funny.”

“It’s not inexpensive,” Barbara Rockman of San Francisco said of such classes, “and so that limits access for some people.”

Compton’s program, for example, charges $700 per person to join a 13-week class of five people.

A recent court ruling could persuade even more people to sign up.

In Fragante v. City and County of Honolulu, a Filipino man argued that Honolulu city officials practiced racial discrimination in refusing to hire him for a clerk’s job.

City attorneys argued successfully that Manuel Fragante’s heavy Filipino accent would have kept him from working effectively as a clerk. Last spring, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a federal appeals court decision supporting the city.

Rockman said the decision is worrisome. “It just opens the door for potential kinds of discrimination,” she said.

Many speech and language pathologists alter accents with methods developed to treat speech disorders such as stuttering. But Koenigsknecht is careful to explain ASHA’s position that accents are not disorders.

Like Koenigsknecht, accent teachers contend they are teaching a new skill rather than correcting a problem. Rockman and Compton both noted that many black Americans often speak two distinct dialects of English and switch between them as circumstances demand.

A 1989 ASHA survey found 6,000 or more of the association’s 47,000 speech and language pathologists worked with people’s accents.

Koenigsknecht says the demand for accent training has grown in recent years among people who speak regional American dialects, though he estimates they make up less than a fifth of all such students.

“If you have a regional dialect it marks you as an outsider,” says Dr. Carol Fleming, who calls her San Francisco business “The Sound of Your Voice.” “At least out here, let’s say, the Brooklyn accent would be stigmatized. People hear that and they think pushy, hostile, aggressive.”

Fleming describes what she does as “grooming.” For example, she says many clients whose first language is Chinese pronounce each syllable distinctly, as they would in Chinese. She says she teaches them “smooth gliding” from one English syllable to the next.