Before instruction begins, all students complete the Diagnostic Assessment. During the assessment, each student is taught the Clear Talk Strategies. The assessment yields valuable information on what the student needs to learn during the course to be an effective speaker.

Once the program starts, students never get a chance to forget the basic clear talking strategies. They learn the importance and scientific basis of each strategy, what each one means in detail, how to master each one, how to know when they have succeeded and how use of the strategies can become second nature. They get answers to questions like the following:

• What do listeners need to understand you comfortably, with and without a noisy background (as in the workplace or restaurant)?
• How do you shift from your casual to your clear way of talking (all people have both)?
• Which speech sounds require more or less volume?
• How do you know when to put extra oomph into a consonant?
• How do you train your voice to hit the correct number of decibels?
• How do you change the stiffness of your speech muscles for different circumstances?
• How close are you to having all of this right?
• Once you get it right, how do you keep it up?

And the program provides answers that go well beyond these strategies. For example:

• What is the easiest way to produce unfamiliar sounds not spoken in your native tongue?
• How does the position of a letter within a word determine its pronunciation?
• What about vowels? (English has five letters for vowels, but 15 different vowel sounds with rules dictating when to use each one.)
• When does pitch convey a meaning all its own?
• Of all the dozens of possible things to change, which few will make the biggest difference in your intelligibility?

Retention and habitual use of the material learned require not just practice, but perfect and repeated practice. Structured opportunity for this is built into every week of the training and into the accompanying systematic practice program with speech sound lessons on CDs. What is the outcome? Average sustained intelligibility increase after one semester is 30%.

For maximum efficiency, instruction is offered in two forms: one-on-one (once a week for one hour) or small group instruction with sessions once a week for two hours, 6 people per class. Systematic home practice takes about 20 minutes, five to seven days a week, with the rest of the practice taking place in everyday life.

After the first 12-week session is finished, students can continue to intermediate and advanced levels of instruction.