EDUCATION: ESL Pronunciation
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Ellen Taft (206) 323-0599
Ellen Taft, ADVS, works with actors whose American accents are not standard or whose first language is not American English. She has experience working with the following nationalities: Chinese, Japanese, East Indians, Indonesians, Russians, Spanish & South Americans, Poles, British and natives of the Bronx. She uses both listening exercises and specific kinestetic tongue and lip placement exercises so that non-natives can be more easily understood at work and on the telephone. She has experience working with the high-tech community and is conversant with British English, so that she can work with students who did not learn American English prior to coming to the U.S. At student's request, Taft teaches the International Phonetic Alphabet, painlessly.
Taft has an Advanced Diploma of Voice Studies ( ADVS) from the Central School of Speech and Drama, in London and a Certificate of Teaching English as a Foreign Language from International House, also in London. For six years, Taft taught ESL and German in the United Kingdom, Germany and Minnesota. She has been teaching accents and accent reduction for over 30 years. (www.AccentReductionInstruction.com)
Kate Forster (206) 235-0659
Kate is a master of accents and is a busy dialect coach in Seattle. She has an MA in Linguistics with a special concentration on phonetics and phonology (the sounds of human languages). She has taught English as a Second Language, including accent reduction, in Japan, and at University of Washington.