Drew Sisera - English Communication and Accent Coaching

One of my clients, who's a doctor, recently asked me a question I found really interesting:
"What's the relationship between writing and speaking?"

I told him to imagine a family.

Writing and speaking are like a brother and a sister.

They share the same parents, communication, but they each developed very different personalities.
When we write, we have the luxury of time. We can stop halfway through a sentence, reread what we've written, replace a word, restructure an idea, or delete everything and start again. The thinking happens slowly enough that we can carefully shape what we want to say.

Speaking asks us to do exactly the same thing...
..except we have to do it in real time.

That's why I don't believe speaking and writing are fundamentally different skills. They're both built upon the ability to organize ideas clearly. The only real difference is how much time the brain has available to organize those ideas.

One of my favourite activities reflects this.

I'll ask a client to write a sentence, read it aloud several times while gradually increasing the speed, then put the paper away. From there, I ask them to communicate the exact same meaning again... but using completely different words.

Not because I'm looking for variety.
Because I'm looking for flexibility.

The more ways you can express the same idea, the less dependent you become on memorized sentences. Instead, you begin developing something much more valuable: the ability to construct language in the moment.

That's one of the defining characteristics of effective communicators. They're rarely searching for the correct sentence. They're comfortable creating a new one.

People often assume that speaking faster means moving your mouth faster. I don't think that's what's happening.

In this session, my client was struggling with the phrase "and with speed." The individual words weren't particularly difficult, but putting them together felt slow and effortful. Rather than practicing the entire phrase repeatedly, we focused on something much smaller.

The N, D, and TH all require the tongue to work near the front of the mouth. Once my client became aware of that, the goal shifted. Instead of thinking about three separate words, she began thinking about how little her tongue actually needed to move between them. The phrase immediately started feeling more connected.

I think this reveals something interesting about motor learning. As beginners, we often believe improvement comes from trying harder. More effort. More force. More repetition. But as skill develops, the opposite often becomes true. Experts don't usually make bigger movements. They make fewer unnecessary ones. Whether it's speaking, playing an instrument, typing, or playing sports, proficiency often looks less like doing more and more like removing everything that isn't needed.

There are moments in English where pronunciation doesn't just affect how a word sounds.
It changes what the word is.

Take the word "conflict"....
As a noun, we say CON-flict.
As a verb, we say con-FLICT.

The spelling stays exactly the same. The only thing that changes is where we place the stress. Yet that small shift signals to the listener whether we're talking about a conflict or whether two things conflict with one another.

I find this fascinating because it reminds us that communication extends far beyond individual sounds. Stress, rhythm, and intonation all carry meaning. Native speakers rely on these patterns constantly, often without realizing they're doing it. That's one of the reasons learners sometimes produce grammatically correct English but still sound slightly unnatural. The words are correct, but the rhythm is telling a different story.

One of the questions I ask myself after almost every coaching session is this:

"Did I solve today's problem... or did I help my client solve tomorrow's?"

Those are two very different things.

In this session, I explained that the goal of my coaching isn't simply to tell clients what's right and what's wrong. If that were the case, they'd improve while they're with me, but struggle the moment they're on their own.

I'm trying to build something much more valuable....Awareness!

I want my clients to notice when an idea could be structured more clearly. I want them to hear when their pronunciation changes the meaning of a word. I want them to sense when they've spoken for too long, when a better word exists, or when their body language is sending a different message than their words.

Eventually, those observations stop coming from me and they begin coming from them.

In psychology, this is closely related to metacognition, the ability to think about your own thinking while it's happening. Communication works in much the same way. The strongest communicators aren't constantly being corrected by other people. They're quietly evaluating themselves while the conversation unfolds, making small adjustments before anyone else even notices.

That's why many of my sessions feel less like traditional English lessons and more like guided self-reflection.

The ultimate goal isn't for my clients to become dependent on my feedback, but for them to develop an internal voice that's just as thoughtful, analytical, and intentional as the one they hear from me each week.

That's when real independence begins!

When you spend years creating something, it's easy to forget that people are quietly watching.
In one of my recent trial sessions, a client told me that after watching my coaching clips on Instagram, he felt like he had to book a session. Not because of a sales pitch. Not because of a discount, but simply because something about the way I taught resonated with him.

But what surprised me wasn't that he booked. It was that he told me...
As creators, we're constantly putting our work into the world without really knowing how it's being received. We see view counts. We see likes. Maybe the occasional comment. But those numbers don't tell us why someone connected with what we made.

Hearing someone explain that a piece of content genuinely influenced a decision they made was surprisingly meaningful.

I think we often underestimate the value of giving positive feedback...

When someone tells us that our work mattered, even in a small way, it doesn't just validate the work we've already done. It often gives us the motivation to keep doing it!

So if someone's work has helped you recently, whether it's a teacher, a creator, a colleague, or a friend, tell them. You might think it's a small comment. It probably won't feel small to them!

When my client asked me how to pronounce accurately, I could have just said the word, asked her to repeat it a few times, and moved on...

But I don't think that's where real learning happens. Instead, we slowed everything down. We looked at the stress pattern. We isolated the vowel that was causing the problem. We built the word piece by piece until she could feel exactly where things were going wrong.

What's interesting is that this is how I approach almost every communication problem. I'm rarely interested in correcting the final result. I'm much more interested in identifying the smallest point where things begin to break down.

Sometimes it's a vowel. Sometimes it's word stress. Sometimes it's grammar. Sometimes it's not even language at all, but uncertainty or self-doubt that's interrupting someone's thinking before they speak.

Once you find that point, improvement tends to happen much faster because you're no longer treating the symptom - you're addressing the cause.

I think this reflects a broader principle in learning...

When something feels difficult, our instinct is often to repeat the whole task over and over, hoping it eventually gets easier. Sometimes that's necessary. More often, though, the better question is:
"Which tiny part of this process is actually creating the difficulty?"

Answer that question well enough, and the rest often begins taking care of itself.

One of the most rewarding moments in coaching is when a client improves without realizing they've improved.

In this session, my client was reading a passage aloud. As I listened, I noticed something that hadn't been there months earlier. His intonation naturally began rising before several prepositions, creating a rhythm that sounded much more like natural English. When I pointed it out, he hadn't even realized he was doing it.

To me, that's one of the clearest signs that learning is beginning to transfer.

At the beginning of the learning process, every new skill requires conscious attention. You think about your pronunciation, you think about your grammar, you think about where to pause, how to structure your sentence, and which words to choose. It can feel mentally exhausting because every decision is deliberate.

Over time, through repetition, feedback, and meaningful practice, those decisions become less conscious. What once required effort gradually becomes instinctive. In psychology, this is often described as automaticity, the point where a skill no longer demands the same level of conscious control because the brain has strengthened the underlying pathways through repeated use.

That's why I pay close attention to the moments my clients don't notice. Not because they're making fewer mistakes, but because they're beginning to produce high-quality communication without actively thinking about every individual piece. Those are often the moments that tell me the learning is becoming part of who they are.

The goal of my coaching has never been to think about English forever, but to think about your ideas, while your communication quietly begins to manage itself...

One of the biggest mistakes I see English learners make is trying to improve a sentence before they've fully understood what the sentence is trying to communicate.

In one of the activities I do with my clients, I intentionally give them a paragraph filled with poor grammar, awkward vocabulary, and confusing sentence structure. Their instinct was to begin fixing it immediately. Instead, I challenge them to stop and ask me questions about what I actually meant. We unpacked each idea one by one before making a single grammatical correction.
The purpose of the exercise wasn't really grammar, but analytical thinking.

Communication begins with intention. Before we can choose better words, improve sentence structure, or correct grammar, we first need absolute clarity about the idea we're trying to express. Otherwise, we're simply polishing language that may not accurately represent our thoughts.

This process mirrors something we see in communication itself. Effective communicators don't assume they've understood another person's meaning. They clarify, they ask questions, and they test their interpretation before responding. The same habit can be applied internally. As you write, you can pause and ask yourself, do these words actually communicate what I intend them to communicate?

That's one of the skills I'm trying to develop in my clients. It's not about the ability to write better English, but the ability to think critically about the relationship between their ideas and the language they choose to represent them.

One of the things that surprises many English learners is that native speakers don't always pronounce words the same way in every situation.

With my one client who plans to one day work overseas, we explored something called the flapped T, a feature that's very common in North American English. When the letter T appears between two vowel sounds, it often changes into a sound that's much closer to a soft D. That's why "water" often sounds more like"wadder", "little" becomes "liddle", and portal is commonly pronounced more like "pordal" in everyday conversation.

What makes this interesting is that this isn't a different pronunciation learners have to memorize. It's a natural consequence of speaking more quickly. As our speech speeds up, our articulators begin searching for more efficient movements. Rather than making a full T sound, the tongue makes a much lighter tap against the roof of the mouth, allowing the rhythm of speech to continue with less effort.

This is one of the reasons I teach pronunciation differently depending on the context. If I'm introducing a new word or speaking very carefully, I'll often pronounce the T clearly so my clients can hear its underlying form. Once that foundation is established, I gradually introduce the way the word changes in natural conversation. I don't want my clients copying fast speech before they understand what they're actually hearing/producing.

At the end of the day, learning pronunciation isn't just about producing sounds. It's about understanding why those sounds change. Once you understand the system behind spoken English, native-like speech begins to feel much less random and much more predictable.

One of the reasons I created my communication framework was because I noticed that many people believed communication ended the moment they spoke. It doesn't.

I explained to my client that every idea passes through multiple stages before another person truly understands it. First, we have to know what we want to say. Then we have to choose language that accurately represents that idea. Finally, we have to deliver it in a way that's easy for another person to process. If any one of those stages breaks down, misunderstandings become much more likely.

One of the things I've observed over years of coaching is that many people place almost all of their attention on getting the idea out of their heads as quickly as possible. They rarely stop to ask themselves whether their word choice is the clearest, whether their pronunciation supports understanding, or whether they should pause for a moment to reorganize the sentence before continuing.

That's why I encourage my clients to slow down, especially in the beginning.

From a cognitive perspective, speaking is a remarkably demanding task. We're simultaneously retrieving vocabulary, organizing grammar, monitoring pronunciation, evaluating our own output, and adapting to another person's reactions. Deliberately slowing the process gives the brain enough time to coordinate those systems more effectively. As those patterns strengthen through repetition, they gradually become automatic.

This is the foundation of my coaching philosophy.

As our work deepens, our conversations become more challenging. We move beyond structured exercises into discussions that require opinions, reasoning, and spontaneous thinking. That's where the framework really begins to matter, because clear communication isn't measured by how well you repeat something you've practiced, but by how clearly you can express an idea you've never shared before.