Speech Therapy
"You really could benefit from some speech therapy."
You're right, that statement may be hard to approach. However, you could go about it a completly different way.
Many Deaf people know absolutely nothing about Cued Speech. One of my Hard-of-Hearing friends was absolutely shocked, when he saw it for the first time. At first, he was laughing, but he was later interested. When I was watching the captioned/signed video with him, there was one girl with a CI with
perfect speech. As soon as I heard her speaking, I said, "Wow!" He asked me, "What?" I signed, "That girl has perfect speech. If I didn't know she had a cochlear implant, I would not know that she was Deaf." Another example happened when we were at Deaf Nation Expo, and we saw a Deaf woman with a CI speaking. I overheard her, and I signed, "Wow!" My friend said, "What?" I signed, "That lady has really good speech."
At first my friend thought negatively about CIs, but after he sees that, not only are Hearing people accepting of people with CIs, they are impressed by them, he is less akward about learning about CIs. It may be hard to convince a Deaf person (who does not speak) to participate in speech therapy, but in my experiance, Hard-of-Hearing, Oral Deaf, and Latened Deafened people are rather intrigued by it. For example, when my friend used his CapTel (Captioned Telephone) to call me, I asked him to call me back with STS (Speech-to-Speech) relay. He did, and I understood him much better. He saw everything the STS CA (Communication Assistant) re-voiced on his CapTel display. If the CA said something wrong, he made sure to speak it more carefully, or spell it, so I would understand. He asked me, when I came over, to help him pronounce the words that the STS CA had difficulty pronouncing. We used Tadoma (Tactile Throatreading/Lipreading [Oralism for DeafBlind {He placed one hand on my throat, and the other near my mouth}]) with Lipreading until he pronounced the word correctly. He was astonished that his speech was so different, and he became more interested in speech therapy. He asked me why it's so hard for me to teach him how to say certian sounds, and I explained that English spelling doesn't always show how to pronounce the words. The spelling and the pronounciation can be totally different. A dictionary shows a pronounciation key. Then I refered back to Cued Speech. I signed, "If you knew Cued Speech, I could teach you how to say any word right away." "Yeah," he said, regretfully.