Chris immigrated from Hong Kong and had been teaching at a university for several years. His yearly feedback from students often highlighted lack of clarity. He felt he wasn't able to teach effectively in English. When he listened to himself teach, he felt he sounded monotone.
This was also a practical problem. One of his students was hard of hearing and relied on auto-generated closed captions to follow his lectures. Those captions were consistently wrong. His pronunciation patterns were making it difficult for the technology, and for students, to follow along.
Over 24 sessions, Chris worked on two related areas.
On clarity: his speech therapist identified specific sound patterns from his Cantonese background that were creating confusion. R, L, and W sounds were sounding like each other, making it impossible to tell the difference between "freeze" and "fleece". Certain sound patterns were changing the meaning of words entirely: "three" became "free," "bed" became "bad." His students were regularly having difficulty following lectures directly because of these patterns.
On expressiveness: the work focused on using intonation deliberately, a use of the pitch of voice that isn't present in Cantonese. Intonation patterns signal to students when something was important versus background information, so expectations of his lectures became audible, not just visible in a syllabus.
As his pronunciation improved, the automatic closed captioning for his lectures started generating correctly more often.
After 24 sessions, Chris's students were more engaged and able to follow the lecture material. Accurate captions supported not only students who were hard of hearing, but also students with different language backgrounds. Chris finally received higher ratings on lecture clarity compared to past years.
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