What is Accent Comprehension?
When it comes to improving communication skills, diversity training often focuses on one side of the street: accent reduction for foreign nationals. But communication is a two-way street, and there are also tools to help English speakers create effective, two-way dialogue.
ARI's patent-pending training program, Building Bridges-Tuning Your Ear to Accents, teaches English speakers how to easily understand the accents of their clients and colleagues.
Accent comprehension training minimizes the need to ask, "What? What did you say?" The fear of insulting someone or misunderstanding important information goes away. Communication in a multicultural environment becomes seamless and stress-free.
The Origin of Accent Comprehension Training
The idea to create accent comprehension training arose from a request made by the American Medical Association in the Fall of 2005. While they knew about the Ravin Method® for accent reduction, they wondered if we had something that could help medical transcriptionists understand dictations with heavily accented speech.
Today, upwards of 34% of US healthcare professionals are foreign born. Foreign born workers, in general, comprise about 15.5% of the US civilian labor force, or about 23.9 million workers. That got our brains spinning! How could we assist our economy, and our clients, in a greater way?
Diversity is creating the mix. Inclusion is making the mix work in ways that drive a company’s bottom line.
Some facts about communication skills:
- Communication skills are essential for maximizing performance and increasing profitability.
- Eliminating language barriers creates engaged employees.
- It is estimated that it costs four times as much to replace an employee than to provide professional development training for experienced personnel.
- Engaged employees create engaged clients.
- The cost of losing a client, and your credibility, is incalculable.
- Companies that have a high quality, culturally diverse workforce and customer base have a competitive edge.
Accent Reduction and Accent Comprehension in Communication and Diversity Training
If our mission is really to remove language barriers while maintaining each person's unique cultural identity, then it's not enough to just focus on accent reduction.
- We have to look at communication as a two way street. That's part of this idea of cultural integrity, especially in the context of globalization and the global economy, where everyone has a role to play in creating effective communication.
- At the heart of the matter it's this empowering of every constituent of the workforce that really builds strong teams and organizations.
- The flipside of the accent reduction coin is accent comprehension. ARI is the only company that truly walks the walk; we are so devoted to this concept that we have created a patent pending methodology and training curriculum to help people listen and decode unfamiliar accents.
While accent reduction is for everyone for whom English is a second language, accent comprehension is simply for everyone.
We found that Building Bridges-Tuning Your Ear to Accents helps all members of an organization bridge the language divide. As a result, organizations are better positioned to maintain, and increase, their competitive advantage.
Accent comprehension training improves morale, productivity, teamwork, and an organization's bottom line.