About this ebook
About the author
Shirley Grady is a linguist, speech coach, and language acquisition researcher with over fifteen years of experience helping learners master the sound systems of languages they were never exposed to as children. Her work sits at the intersection of articulatory phonetics, cognitive neuroscience, and second language acquisition, drawing on research from all three fields to build practical, evidence-based pronunciation training systems.
Grady earned her bachelor's degree in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on phonological theory and the acoustic analysis of speech. She went on to complete a master's degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington, concentrating on the motor planning and execution of speech sounds in second language learners. Her graduate research examined the effectiveness of visual biofeedback—using real-time spectrograms and ultrasound tongue imaging—in helping adult learners acquire non-native phonemes that do not exist in their first language inventory.
Before founding her own pronunciation coaching practice, Grady worked as a speech-language pathology assistant specializing in accent modification and as a phonetics instructor at the university level. She has coached professionals from over forty countries, including diplomats, software engineers, medical practitioners, and university faculty, all working to improve their spoken intelligibility in English and other languages. Her clients have included executives at Fortune 500 companies preparing for international presentations, researchers delivering conference talks in a second language, and immigrants seeking to communicate more effectively in their adopted countries.
Grady is the creator of the Articulatory Awareness Method, a structured approach to pronunciation training that combines explicit articulatory instruction with targeted listening discrimination and spaced repetition practice. She has presented her method at conferences including the Acoustical Society of America, the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, and the annual conference of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Her writing on pronunciation pedagogy has appeared in the *Journal of Second Language Pronunciation*, the *CATESOL Journal*, and the *Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching proceedings*.
In addition to her coaching and research work, Grady develops digital tools for pronunciation practice. She is the creator of Formant Coach, a web application that uses real-time acoustic analysis to provide visual feedback on vowel and consonant production. The tool is used by university phonetics programs in the United States and Europe and has been featured in the *TESOL CALL Interest Section Newsletter*.
Grady is a lifelong language learner herself. She has studied Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, German, and Arabic at various levels, and she maintains a daily pronunciation practice in the languages she is currently learning. She is fluent in Spanish and has working proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. She regularly participates in language exchange communities and maintains that every pronunciation challenge she has helped a client overcome was one she first had to overcome herself.
She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she runs her coaching practice, develops new tools and materials for pronunciation training, and leads regular practice groups for language learners. She is currently at work on her second book, which focuses on the prosody and intonation patterns of the world's major languages for second language learners.
