An engineer who was being asked to repeat himself in every meeting

The client — A VP of engineering at a US technology group, Italian first language, fifteen years working in English, entirely fluent by any reasonable measure.

The problem — In large meetings his proposals were routinely restated by someone else a minute later, and the restatement was what the room responded to. He had begun to interpret this as a status problem. It was an intelligibility problem: listeners were spending enough effort decoding the sentence that they had nothing left for the argument inside it.

What we found — Not the accent. A short, specific list: word-final consonants dropping away, so sentence endings blurred; two vowel pairs English distinguishes and Italian does not; and — by far the biggest factor — English sentence stress landing in the wrong place, which meant the important word in each sentence wasn’t marked as important. Listeners had no signal for what mattered.

What we did — Ten weekly sessions with daily audio exercises between them. Six sessions on stress and rhythm, which is where the return was, and four on the specific sound pairs. No attempt whatsoever to change the accent.

The result — By session six, colleagues had stopped asking him to repeat things. By session ten, his proposals were being discussed under his own name. His accent is unchanged, which was the point.