Accents and Activities

A private student of mine recently requested that we talk about accents. He saved me the trouble of searching for material to base our discussion on by sending me links to sources he found interesting. One of them included audio files of various Australian accents. This didn’t surprise me since that’s currently his country of residence. I love listening to varieties of English, so I enjoyed familiarizing myself with the files. I came up with discussion questions for my student, but almost automatically, I began to think of other possibilities the audio recordings lend themselves to for language learners in general.

Take a look at the audio illustrations that folks at Macquarie University have compiled. There are more than a dozen statements read aloud by various speakers. How can you make use of these files in the classroom? What ideas can you come up with? Here are a few that I thought of:

• Dictation. Classic exercise. Could be more effective if first done individually, and then in pairs after a second listening. One pair could volunteer to write their text on the board, and a third and final listening would follow to confirm their accuracy.

 

• Dictation and creative writing. Make the activity more meaningful by asking students to provide more context for one-line from the site. Personally, I’d love to write a mini story based on this one: “They noticed that the door of the hunting lodge stood ajar and they grabbed their guns in fear.”[1] Two men from two different regions read that sentence. The first is fairly dramatic. I’d play both audio files, have the students write down what they hear, correct their work, and then ask them to work with a partner to add one line before and two or three lines after.

 

• Infer rhythmic patterns. Are you ready to teach a lesson on sentence stress? You could play a few audio samples like these, which are all one-liners. Play the clips, show the transcripts on the board, and then have students listen again to identify the stressed words. Guide them to make accurate conclusions about content words (e.g. nouns) and function words (e.g. articles).

 

I must thank my student for asking me to explore the links he sent. It brought to my attention yet another amazing resource that’s just a click away: audio recordings of accents in English. Here are some additional sites you might find useful:

• The Speech Accent Archive. I loved browsing via their map feature. I listened to my hometown dialect as and samples from several other places in the U.S. and Canada. The man from St. Louis, by the way, provides a nice model for thought groups.
• International Dialects of English Archives. Some recordings are rather lengthy, but  you could use only an excerpt. Check out the clip recorded by a man from Martinique. Within the first two minutes or so, he tells a story about a woman who took a goose to the vet.  You could transcribe the story partially, challenging students to complete it. Alternatively, they could simply listen, and in stages do both summarizing and predicting.

 

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[1] http://clas.mq.edu.au/voices/audio-illustrations

Which Pronunciation Should We Teach Our Students? [Part Two]

Let me address the teacher’s own speech in greater detail. This is an important factor to consider in answering our main question about which pronunciation we should teach our students. It is not so simple to say, for example, that standard American English should be taught in ESL programs in the U.S. It is also not so simple to say, for example, that British English (RP) should be the norm in EFL programs in Russia. Why? In the case of ESL, not all teachers speak the standard form of English in that country. In the U.S., for instance, a person from Texas and a person from New Jersey can have very different accents. In the case of EFL, there is often increased diversity among teachers. At one school alone, there may be native and non-native speakers, and the native speakers may all be from different countries: Ireland, Wales, Canada, the U.S., and more.

In the face of such variation among teachers, how can consistency be achieved? I stated that consistent models are needed for learners to establish a solid pronunciation base. Let me take this idea further now that we are considering the realities of ESL and EFL programs. There does not have to be only one form of English taught at one school, but within a single classroom pronunciation instruction should be limited to one form of English. Consistency is created by the teacher. The teacher’s own speech needs to be natural and consistent.

Let me first address native speakers teaching in the classroom. I can comment more boldly on this group, since it is the one I belong to. I believe there is a danger if teacher tries to change his or her natural pronunciation to conform to a standard form of English. It is my opinion that the effort to produce speech sounds and patterns that radically go against one’s native speech can lead to an inconsistent model for students. A teacher who speaks a regional or cultural dialect (e.g., Boston English) should speak clearly yet in a way that is natural and authentic. This teacher should also make students aware that his or her speech varies from the standard. For the most part, I believe I speak standard American English. However, I am aware that I fall into the group of speakers who pronounce words like cot and caught the same. When I must cover these vowel sounds in a pronunciation lesson, I am careful to note this pattern of mine. I have used audio samples of other speakers to supplement my instruction so that learners could hear the two distinct sounds.

Both as EFL and ESL teachers, native speakers should strive for consistency. Even when native speakers find themselves in an EFL setting, and their form of English is not the one generally preferred in that country, I would argue that it is best to continue speaking with their native pronunciation and not try to adopt another accent. For example, when I taught English in Russia, I made no attempt to adopt a British accent, though British English was often favored there. My Russian students heard my North American flapped Ts, hard Rs, and everything else considered standard in that form of English. I should note that most students came to me with previous study of English, so a pronunciation base was already in place. If they spoke to me with sounds and patterns more typical of British English, I allowed it. I only corrected their pronunciation when clarity was lacking.

In the case of teachers who are non-native speakers, I can comment with much less authority. My experience is secondhand: I have observed foreigners in the ESL setting who taught pronunciation lessons competently and effectively. My conclusion for this group of teachers would be that solid training, especially when followed by full immersion in a particular form of English, provides a pronunciation base that non-native speakers can rely on while teaching. Whether the setting be EFL or ESL, the need for consistency is just as strong for the non-native speaker. In fact, this need is coupled with a second one: the need for an accurate assessment of one’s own accent. For non-natives who are aware of a lack of accuracy in their own pronunciation (e.g., with a particular vowel sound), recorded materials can supplement and increase the consistency of instruction.

I want to emphasize a final time the need for consistency – consistency in production. I make this point to teachers and students alike. Be consistent in production, but learn to comprehend varieties of English. From around the world English learners often write to me, asking which accent they should try to master. I have noted that other online teachers give the same advice that I do: We tell students that the ultimate goal is to be understood and not to sound exactly like a native American speaker, a native British speaker, or anyone else. Unless you are training to be an actor or voice artist, accent elimination should not be the goal. Reducing the influence of L1 to achieve clarity in L2 is the goal. Having a foreign accent does not necessarily interfere with communication. Which pronunciation should we teach our students? Clear pronunciation.