English is one of the hardest languages to learn if you are not a native speaker. There are so many rules and exceptions to try and keep straight. Forget just translating vocabulary, you also have to worry about your sentence rhythm and structure, tone of voice and grammatical flow.
AXIOM friend Lauren Supraner of CAL Learning (Cultural and Language Training) with a workshop on Sentence Stress and Rhythm that is designed to help non-native speakers become more comfortable in a business setting. 
This is part of a 7-part series on accent reduction and pronunciation for non-native speakers. These are half day workshops that cover a variety of topics that can improve speaking confidence for the learner and allow companies to develop employees for more and greater communication and leadership roles.
For this topic participants will adopt the correct phrasing and stress patterns that overlay an entire statement. Lauren will teach people to start to speak in short phrases instead of speaking word by word, which can be confusing. Then, she will help apply correct stress and move from word to phrase to sentence rhythm. Participants will ultimately learn to control stress and use focus words to lead the listener’s attention. Other topics include:
- To use correct stress and reduction in both content and function words
- How to break speech into short idea chunks and phrases
- Stress rules within phrases
- How to use focus stress to guide the listener
Lauren will come to you with all necessary materials for these half day workshops. Each session is one topic that Lauren can really dive into. These classes for up to 15 participants are more intensive that a longer session that might include several accent reduction techniques.
They also function singularly, so you can chose to attend one, a few, or all sessions. You don’t need to take them in order and you will not miss anything if you choose to take only a small subset of workshops.
Please contact us if you have any interest in these workshops. We’re happy to set up a schedule that works for your group.
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