The English Language Support Office is now offering a more robust Pronunciation Tutoring Service ever, with eight peer tutors on its staff. This service, established in 2016 by Melissa Myers, helps graduate students, professional students, and postdocs across the university communicate more clearly in the classroom, when giving conference presentations, and during the job search. ELSO Director Michelle Crow stated, “Since Melissa started Pronunciation Tutoring, the service has been very popular and highly valued. This Service is one of the real highlights of the ELSO program. It is so unique in its approach, something Cornell offers that no other university does.”
The idea for the Pronunciation Tutoring Service came when Myers learned that some international graduate students were going to local medical facilities for accent reduction therapy. They told Myers that they were embarrassed by their accents and were paying therapists with the goal of speaking with a standardized American accent. Myers, who wanted students to value their accents and gain confidence as speakers, set to work to create a model focused on clear communication, student agency, and collaboration between the tutor and student.
Pronunciation tutoring centers are rare, so Myers had to create the model from scratch. To prepare tutors for this work, Myers developed a training model grounded in a co-inquiry approach (Crow, Lindberg & Myers, 2022), which emphasizes collaboration, investigation, reflection, and mutual expertise. Tutors help clients to identify which aspects of pronunciation most affect intelligibility, or how well they are understood. Tutor support plays a critical role in helping students “notice” (Swain, 2005) these language features and develop personalized strategies for improvement.
During a biweekly tutor training meeting in spring 2025, tutor Brayan Cuevas noted, “What you’ve put together for this program is so impressive! Is there a way you can publish it, so other programs can benefit from it?” As a result, Myers and lead tutor Rachel Bradley submitted a proposal to share this work with a wider audience. They will be presenting, Training Pronunciation Tutors to Help Multilingual Graduate Students, at the 16th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference—an annual meeting devoted to the research and teaching of second or additional languages— at Concordia University in October 2025.
