Name: Why ESL Learners Need COACHING, Not Speech Therapy
Uploaded: 2026-03-15T17:35:09.000Z
Duration: 8 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey, everyone, this is Jennifer with Tarle Speech.

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And Last year, in 2025, we completed the 50 week American English Pronunciation Masterclass challenge, where we went through every sound in American English, learned about it, learned how to make that sound, and

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Each week throughout that, I got a lot of questions about speech therapy and if you need speech therapy to fix your accent, and

the short answer is, no, you do not need speech therapy.

And then people would also ask, so is speech therapy about helping me to get rid of an accent?

Now, that is a little more of a complex question.

So let's kind of dive into that today and talk about it a little bit.

And speech therapy is ultimately not about erasing identity.

It is about helping people to be functional communicators.

So I am here as a communications coach for all of you to help you to be as intelligible and as clear and confident in your communication as possible.

I can help people who have speech and language disabilities to gain communication and to use their communication skills to their maximum ability.

But with all of you, I am here to help you to be creative, clear and confident speakers.

And that pattern can include sounds, sound rules, grammar rules, and vocabulary choices.

So when we are very young, we have this incredible ability to hear and.

And to learn patterns and to use those patterns from many different languages amazingly well.

And that's why many people who learn languages when they are younger can speak languages with almost no, if no accent at all.

As we get older, it's a little bit harder to do that because we lose the ability to hear all of the sounds and to kind of have that pattern recognition that we do when we are young.

It really depends on who you ask whether you have an accent or not.

So I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, and I have an accent that is called Pittsburghese.

And when I moved to Ohio for college, everyone there said, oh, you have an accent.

And I was shocked because to me, the people in Ohio had the accent.

So that's just like a nice little antidote as to how we think about accents.

An accent is just something that we do when we are speaking.

But you can change it if your accent is becoming a problem.

And it's making it really difficult for you to communicate and you are becoming frustrated.

I work with many people, one on one, to help them to reduce their accent and to become clear.

And the way that we do that is through a coaching model.

So I have have the person read a lot of words, read a paragraph, and

And then I analyze what is different, what is impacting the way that that person is speaking.

And then we come up with a plan based on patterns and how those patterns impact the way other people can understand them.

And then we address those patterns from week to week.

The person goes off and practices on their own, and

then comes back and we learn a new pattern.

You can watch that video link that below, and those are on clear speaking.

It's about speaking slow enough, loud and low enough, opening and moving your mouth enough, pausing and elongating some words and your vowels in English.

So again, intelligibility is really the issue with an accent.

And it's about your ability to be understood without being frustrated.

So you can change nothing or you can change a lot of things.

It really depends on you, on your situation, and

what you need for work or just for yourself to feel confident.

So I always tell my students, it's not about sounding like me.

A lot of my students choose to code switch, which means they will use some strategies at work or in social settings or with certain people in order to be as clear as possible, and

They speak, however feels most genuine and natural.

And I always use the example of if you are speaking to someone who has a hearing impairment, this is if you're speaking to someone who has hearing difficulties in any language.

We change the way that we speak to help that person understand us the best.

This is what I am encouraging all of my students to do, which is to just flex a little bit to help the person to whom you are speaking.

And I would even take this a step further and say that everybody needs to do this.

Not just a person who may have an accent, but

everyone needs to be a clear and effective communicator at all times.

So I really believe that we can all have better lives through better communication.

And better communication means different things for different people.

it's about embracing communication so that you can be as effective and as confident in your speaking as you need to be.

And I do that to help people access the world and to be functional within the world.

But most of you out there don't need speech therapy.

You just need a few strategies, maybe to learn a few patterns.

And then you can apply what you need as you need it, to be as effective as possible.

choose what is best for you to maximize your communication for confidence and effectiveness.