Job Discussion Forums

[ExpatLuke]

[ajc19810]

Accents is a complicated one. In the past it was very much a matter of 'beggars cant be choosers' with regards to students having a choice of teachers. However, now students have a much broader range to choose from with the increase in teachers.

In my experience it is uncommon for a one school to have only one nationality.

The American teacher is by far and away the most popular choice. Obviously influenced by where students want to go and TV,music stc and along with a number of other factors. Although, there does seem to be a shift towards students changing their preference to Australia and other countries. While family connections and the American dream are still enticing students by the masses to the US, students are realizing the benefits of other countries, in particular education.

It's also worth pointing out that the enforcement of qualifications in the country has and will continue to play a part in the English which is spoken here.

[TRH]

I have been thinking for a while about the issue of what type of English is being taught in Vietnam. I was hesitant to post my ideas but since the subject has come up, here they are. In particular, I wondered why most texts and testing regimes are based on British English. I have tried to approach the question in what I hope is a rational manner. I certainly am not going to say that either variant is better than the other as that is both inappropriate and impossible. In fact I am personally fairly comfortable listening to a British accent as I had grandparents from Birmingham, England.

There are surely both historical and cultural reasons why British English seems to dominate the curriculum. The British were for a few centuries unashamedly colonialists and saw the propagation of English as in their national interest. The British have over time developed curricula and organizations to achieve that end. On the other hand, the US has historically seen itself as anti-colonial, regardless of the reality. In fact the one country where the US was overtly colonial and systematically introduced English was the Philippines. As we know, the effort was very successful. Also Americans tend to work on the somewhat naïve assumption that everyone on earth wants to live in America. Look at US teaching materials and you will see that they are largely developed for TESOL not TEFL and often use US acculturation based topics. The industry, materials, and teacher training is set up to teach immigrants to the US rather than people in other countries. Also Americans tend to rather insensitively expect people in other countries to know English by some magical process while we make little effort to learn the languages of others. The British on the other hand seem to know that they must work at it if they expect others to learn English. Another historical factor may be simply that Britain established full relations with The Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1973 and the US waited until 1995 giving British more time to operate in the country.

What type of English do the Vietnamese want or need? Anecdotally, I was asked the other day by a Vietnamese English teacher about at vs. on the weekend. I first responded that of course it was on but then remembered that at is the British idiom. She said that she would use at on the test she was taking but then said: “I don’t know why we have to learn the British way when the people we want to speak to are Americans.” Approaching her comment analytically consider these numbers:

Viet Kieu: US: 1,799,632 – 64.5% (of total less ASEAN countries except Australia)
CA: 180,125 – 6.5%
AU: 159,848 – 5.7%
UK: 55,000 – 2.0%

Viet Trade: China: 43.40 Bn US$ -19.0% (of total)
US: 24.89 Bn US$ - 10.9%
AU: 6.56 Bn US$ - 2.9%
UK: 4.36 Bn US$ - 1.9%
CA: 1.90 Bn US$ - 0.8%

These numbers tell me that the people Vietnamese most want to speak to and trade with use a North American accent and idioms (by about a 10:1 ratio.) Of course they need to trade with the Chinese but they don’t seem to want to talk to them more than necessary.

[vabeckele]

'Favoured' has to be a relative term in Vietnam. Favoured may mean the Americans only get stiffed once a month, Brits 2 etc..

Goods stats from TRH.

[I'm With Stupid]

I think people make a mistake in thinking that foreigners learn English specifically to speak to Americans or British people. We're not that interesting. They learn English to speak to everyone. And that means a vaguely global English. Let's not forget that a lot of important trading partners in the region have their origins in British English (I can't say whether it's still the taught variety) such as Singapore and Malaysia. Not to mention a lot of the EU countries.

But another important statistic might be the preference of IELTS or TOEFL, which are competing British and American versions of the same thing. But the main reason British English dominates in the materials is simply that all of the big publishers are British, and Vietnam isn't a big enough market to justify localised materials.

I honestly don't think it matters either way tbh. If students have a particular interest one way or another, then they'll learn that type of English irrespective of what we teach them. Gone are the days where CDs are full of BBC accents. In fact, I hear as many foreign accents as natives ones on the latest CDs.

[spiral78]

[mark_in_saigon]

I think given the realities in the differences in dialects, it should be good for the VN to be exposed to those differences. However, it does seem like a lot to expect for a new language learner. I do not feel like most of the students have much awareness of any of these issues. When I meet a group for the first time, I will have them guess my country of origin. Groups will usually pick England as their first choice regardless of accent, I guess because we are teaching English. They will commonly throw in a non English speaking country as a choice, Russia for example. Considering the sheer numbers of Americans, they do not choose it as often as they should if they were just randomly guessing. They seem to have no ability to link accent to any nation until they are quite advanced. They also seem to have no clue what accent they themselves are developing. I do a very informal test and find that most of them follow the British system of dropping the R sound at the end of words, but they just seem to be mimicking what they hear on CDs, not actively choosing what dialect is most suitable for their future goals.

If all this is true, it makes me wonder why Americans are most favored by students/parents/teachers. I will never forget the time a VN English teacher told me that the students were not really able to follow the instruction of one of their foreign teachers, the VN teacher mentioned his British accent was too difficult. The foreign teacher was actually Italian, but everyone assumed he was British.

While English is becoming the dominant international language, any standardization of dialect will probably come indirectly from the influence of the media rather than any intelligent choice by a nation's government or educational system.

I recently read that for the first time in history, a language (ours of course) is now spoken by more non native speakers than native speakers. Pretty interesting to consider that we native speakers are a minority of English users. Have to get used to that idea. The story went on to discuss how we will have to accept that what we consider to be correct may not matter as the language adapts to the realities of use worldwide. The things that bug us (dahk in the pahk or dark in the park, I have an idea or I have an idear) will seem pretty small as time goes on.

[Oh My God]

[8balldeluxe]

[mark_in_saigon]

Ain"t is one of those words that everyone needs to know. Not that you have to use it yourself, but if you did not know what it meant, you would not be up to speed on common English. Like not knowing what yup, nope and uh huh means.

Ain't has a very interesting history, pretty easy to look up, I include a few excerpts from Wikipedia below. If Dickens used it (he did), then I would say we all need to know it. It actually is a real word.

An't with a long "a" sound began to be written as ain't, which first appears in writing in 1749. By the time ain't appeared, an't was already being used for am not, are not, and is not. An't and ain't coexisted as written forms well into the nineteenth century.

Much like an't, han't was sometimes pronounced with a long "a", yielding hain't. With H-dropping, the "h" of han't or hain't gradually disappeared in most dialects, and became ain't.

I like this part especially: During the nineteenth century, the propriety of ain't began to be disputed. Some writers did not know or pretended not to know what ain't was a contraction of, and its use was classified as a vulgarism—a term used by the lower classes. Perhaps partly as a reaction to this trend, the number of situations in which ain't was used began to expand; some speakers began to use ain't in place of is not, have not, and has not.

In the United Kingdom, ain't is generally used only by the working classes, such as those speaking the Cockney dialect, and is often considered improper speech by the middle and upper classes, in contrast to 19th century England where it was readily used in familiar speech by the educated and upper classes.

Ain't has a history of at least 250 years, some forms are older than that, see the article for more details. It is not going away. I would not outright suggest students use it, but if they are going to the west, they certainly need to be aware of it.

[ExpatLuke]

Most slang words are technically real words. For example the word "twerk" was recently added to the oxford online dictionary. All it takes is a word to be used enough for it to either change its meaning or become a "real" word. Think of the word "literally". It has actually taken on the opposite of its original meaning in recent years.

All that said, some regional slang shouldn't be taught to students studying EFL, unless they are specifically studying to go to the same region. If you're planning to live in Scotland, you're probably not going to go looking for an American teacher who has no clue about all the slang and idioms. A good example is how someone earlier in this thread used the phrase "taking a mickey". I had no idea what that meant until I looked it up.

As I said earlier in this thread, the reason most Vietnamese prefer the American English is because they want to understand all the American movies and music that is flooding this country. British English is largely the language of academia (Universities, Research papers, etc), while American English is the language of entertainment and business (Hollywood, US based exports and companies, consumer products).

[Sashadroogie]

Do Vietnamese cinemas screen films in their original language, or are they dubbed?

[ExpatLuke]

Both, but mostly they're in their original languages with Vietnamese subtitles.

[I'm With Stupid]

[I'm With Stupid]