What Actually Happens in an Accent Assessment
A look inside the first 30 minutes I spend with a new client.
Most people who book time with me have never worked with an accent coach before. They are not sure what one does. Some arrive openly skeptical. Others expect a language lesson, or a list of words to repeat after me, or some kind of test they can pass or fail.
None of that is what happens. So here is the session, start to finish, exactly as I run it.
The assessment is 30 minutes. It takes place on Zoom, like all of my coaching. It is free, and I share my pricing with you before we ever meet, so nothing in the conversation turns into a sales surprise.
The first five minutes: you talk, I listen
I ask you to tell me about yourself. What you do, how you got into it, and why you are thinking about accent or communication work right now.
That is the whole instruction: no script, no drills, no phonetic alphabet on the screen.
Five minutes of unrehearsed speech tells me more than any structured test would. Reading aloud is a different physical task from talking, and most people perform better at it, which hides the very habits I need to hear. When you are describing your job or explaining a frustration, your real speech patterns show up: the sounds you avoid, the places you run out of air, the moments your pace jumps because you are worried about being understood.
By the time those five minutes are up, I usually have most of what I need.
Sometimes I will also ask you to read a short passage called “Comma Gets a Cure,” a standard text written to sample a wide range of English sounds in a small amount of speech. I use it to confirm something I think I heard. The diagnosis itself comes from listening to you speak the way you actually speak at work.
The sounds I catch first
There is a predictable order to what surfaces. Within the first minute or two, I am usually hearing:
- The TH sounds, in words like think, three, this, and other. Very few languages have them, and very few learners were ever taught where the tongue physically goes.
- The R sounds, especially R that follows a vowel, in words like world, first, and work. Speakers whose first language uses a tapped or rolled R carry this one the longest.
- The short O, in words like hot, box, and stop.
- The short A, in words like cat, map, and back.
These four account for a large share of what listeners register as a foreign accent. They are also very fixable, because each one is a specific tongue and jaw position that you can learn in a session and then practice.
The things nobody expects me to be listening for
This is where most assessments surprise people. While you are talking about your quarterly targets, I am also tracking:
- Your pace, and whether it is too fast, too slow, or lurching between the two
- Your breath, and specifically whether you run out of it before the end of a sentence
- Jaw tension, which flattens vowels and makes everything sound compressed
- Where you are placing the sound, meaning whether your voice sits forward in the face or gets trapped in the throat
- Your posture and body position
- Your eye contact, including what happens to it when you are searching for a word
Clients rarely connect any of this to their accent. It is the connection that matters most. My approach is voice first: breath, articulation, and resonance. Those three things produce the sound, and the individual vowels and consonants sit on top of them. Someone whose breath collapses halfway through a sentence will lose their last three words no matter how well they have drilled their TH.
So when I tell you at minute twenty that we are going to start with breathing, that is why.
The moment the skepticism usually breaks
Plenty of people arrive at the assessment doubting that any of this is trainable. They believe an accent is fixed, part of who they are, formed in childhood and permanent.
So I show them. Mid-conversation, I will shift into an Indian accent, hold it for a few sentences, and then slide back into my own voice without a pause. It takes about fifteen seconds, and it changes the room.
The point is not that the accent is impressive. The point is that an accent is a set of physical habits: tongue placement, vowel shape, resonance, stress timing, rhythm. Habits are learnable in both directions. Once someone sees a voice move deliberately from one setting to another, the idea that their own voice could move becomes concrete.
That is usually the moment people stop asking whether this works and start asking how long it takes.
What this looked like for Krasimir
Krasimir is an anesthesiologist. When he booked his assessment, he could tell me one thing with certainty: he did not like his accent. Beyond that he had no working definition of the problem and no real idea what accent training involved. The word accent was standing in for a feeling he had about how he came across.
I started him the way I start everyone. Tell me who you are and what you do. Within a couple of minutes I could hear that his voice was already doing a great deal right. It was deep and resonant and well supported, the kind of instrument many clients spend months building. That foundation was already in place.
What was getting in his way was rhythm. English carries a large share of its meaning in stress and intonation, and his patterns were coming from a different system. His words were accurate, and his sounds were largely fine. The melody underneath them was sending signals he did not intend, so listeners had to work harder than they should to follow where the emphasis landed.
There was no way for him to diagnose that on his own. He arrived with a general dissatisfaction and left with a specific target. By the end of the 30 minutes, he understood that the work ahead would be a sequence, each layer built on the one before it and shaped around what his voice actually needed. That is what the assessment is for.
See for yourself what Krassimir had to say in his testimonial.
What you walk away with
I do not use a scoring sheet or a numeric rating. A number on a form tells you nothing you can act on, and it turns a conversation about your voice into a report card. What I do instead is take detailed notes on every session, including this first one, so we have a record from day one and can look back at where you started.
At the end of the 30 minutes, you leave with three things: a clear picture of what my sessions actually look like, an understanding of what we would work on first and why, and a date in the calendar for our next meeting if you want to continue.
Why clarity comes before accent
There is a gap that shows up repeatedly in the executives I work with. Their English is excellent. Their thinking is sharp. And still, in meetings, their ideas do not land with the weight they deserve. I call this the authority gap.
Almost always it is a voice problem rather than a language problem. If breath runs out, sentence endings fade. If jaw tension flattens the vowels that carry emphasis. If your resonance sits too far back or too high up, your voice arrives thin over a laptop speaker. When pace accelerates under pressure, it takes the consonants with it. Each of those is mechanical, and each of those is trainable.
The clients who make the fastest progress are the ones who understand this early. We are working toward clarity. The accent you grew up with is welcome to come along.
How to get the most out of your 30 minutes
Nothing to prepare and nothing to rehearse. Three practical things help:
- Use a quiet room and a headset or a decent microphone, so I am hearing your voice and not your laptop fan
- Use a wired or stable connection if you can, since dropped audio hides exactly the sounds I need
- Come ready to talk about your work, because that is the speech I most need to hear
Bring your skepticism too. It is welcome, and it usually does not survive the half hour. Ha.