Accent Assessment

We spend most of our time helping people with live one-on-one training because it is the only effective solution for real change.

Nonetheless, we know some people would appreciate any expert help, so the lowest-cost resource we can offer is something more reliable and more human than typical online solutions: an expert analysis of your accent.

The Accent Assessment

The Ear & Speak Accent Assessment is intended as an informative analysis of your accent to help you focus correctly on the most important things, rather than random things that people or computers point out to you.

Weak alternative resources

There are many resources you can turn to. They all have siginificant downsides.

Videos on YouTube or social media:

• you learn theoretical knowledge
• no feedback on your own performance
• you don’t know if you’re actually learning to change your pronunciation.

Free or paid apps using AI systems:

• do not process language information like a human
• often use the wrong accent as a reference point (most often US English)
• give feedback which is often unreliable
• can’t judge what problems are the most important to address.

Who is this suitable for?

• For knowledge: people wanting to understand what problems there are with their accent that cause people to misunderstand them in Australia.
• For curiosity: people just curious about what things in their accent are very noticeable.
• For identity: people wanting to work out why they don’t sound as local (in Australia) as they would like to.
• For change: people motivated enough to use the information to help find local assistance/tutoring to make change possible.

What you can do with the assessment:

The assessment is not a replacement for training: it does not “fix” the problems by itself; it is a diagnostic tool for accent. You need to build on it as a prompt to:

• Be aware of the sounds and words that you need to try to change or, failing that, need to be very careful with.
• Find someone to help you further near you (e.g. an English tutor, undergraduate Linguistics student who wants to help, etc).
• Use online resources (YouTube, etc) carefully to try to learn more about the issues we have flagged, keeping in mind that there is limited reliable material suitable for Australian English.
• Get an AI system to create guiding materials for a particular issue.
• Book a 30-minute online appointment with Ear & Speak for a one-off explanatory session ($90).
• Join our Accent Reduction at Home or in-person Accent Reduction programs (but if you’re already interested in those, we suggest not doing the Accent Assessment).

The Ear & Speak Accent Assessment is prepared by us — real-life accent experts, not anonymous tutors or inhuman AI — based on recordings and other info that we will ask you to provide. It takes time to do the analysis.

What you get:

• A personal accent report page on our accent assessment portal that identifies 2-5 issues (depending on complexity) that you should prioritise for change, based on how much they affect the clarity of your speech.
  • These issues might be about individual sounds, or about sounds when they are next to each other (in or between words).
• Recordings of each issue, and explanatory material in the report.
• Individual ratings for each sound in your speech, with a list of all main Australian English sounds.
• Feedback about:
  • the overall clarity of your speech, and
  • how Australian it sounds (if you want to know).

What you won’t get:

• A meaningless score of your accent (e.g. “you have a medium accent”)
• lazy generalisations about the problems (e.g. “you have problems with some vowels”), and
• unnecessarily technical terms to impress you (e.g. “your voiceless stops are unaspirated”).