Class smooths accents of professionals seeking more success

Armed with a tape recorder and endless patience, Sharon Heffley has spent the last 17 years unraveling the knot of mispronunciations and garbled syllables common to many international professionals.

Heffley operates the Accent Modification Center out of her home in northern Virginia, helping upwardly mobile professionals smooth accents that may be holding them back.

"Most of my clients do not come saying they want to assimilate so that nobody knows that they weren't born here," Heffley said during an interview. "They want to be more competitive with their American counterparts."


Dean, a 40-something computer engineer, got the Heffley treatment during a recent lesson. He'd spent five minutes wrestling with a common household word and was getting nowhere.

"Bezz. Bezz. Bezzzzzz," he said.

"You must feel the tongue go up," chirped Heffley, a short, bespectacled woman with a firm nature and an unerring ear. "Do it again, 10 to 15 times!"

A dozen attempts later, success: The Chinese-American man correctly pronounced "beds."

Studies suggest that in corporate America, an accent can mean missed promotions and more time spent behind desks instead of with clients, explained Oscar DeShields Jr., a professor of marketing at California State University, Northridge.

DeShields, who studies accents among salespeople, said customers often see an Irish brogue or a spicy Spanish accent as a cue that someone doesn't know what they're talking about.