Job Discussion Forums

[Atlas]

I was going to post this on the General forum, but actually I think it might be more handy from a Chinese perspective:

Accents. How can you advise your students who are having trouble understanding oral English at work? Perhaps there is more difficulty understanding the Romantic or German accents than say, the simpler American accents (counter opinions welcome!). They are under pressure to perform and I want to give them advice about listening comprehension in the face of different accents. Any advice?

[nolefan]

Generally speaking and without trying to offend anyone, I think that some British and New Zealand accents are a heck of a lot harder to deal with than your average yankee twang( as long a the person doesn't hail from the Louisiana swamps).

We had a conversation about this with some of my kids last week as they have been exposed to Americans, Brits, Scots and Aussies and they seemed to agree with that opinion.

[Nauczyciel]

Folks, let's face it. Our students are far more likely to talk to incompetent non-native speakers of English than to well spoken Americans, Brits etc. throughout their entire life, and even if they have a chance to listen to somebody coming from an English-speaking country s/he will most likely have some non-standard accent as well. So whether you come from Australia, Liverpool, or even "the Louisiana swamps" don't try to pretend you use RP. It's better for the students if we speak the way we speak.

I've been working with teachers from London, Kenya, Israel, India, Spain, Poland etc. and I can tell you - boasting dictionary pronunciation will not help our students. I've spent a good deal of time practising my accent and now native-speakers can't tell which country I come from, but I wonder whether this "non-accent" is actually good for the students. They will certainly find it easier to study the language, but harder to use it in real life. So, my fellow teflers, be yourself and speak yourself. There's nothing better we can do for our students.

[Norman Bethune]

Believing that there is a better English "accent" than others, is a mistake that Chinese School Administrators, Employers, and Government Agencies make all the time.

In Canada and America and Australia and Britain and South Africa and New Zealand and India there are countless english "native speaker" accents (as opposed to dialects). Then there are the numerous accents which non-native second language learners speak with.

Chinese students are so keen to learn the "right accent" to speak with, that they can mimic an American or Ozzie very well. But when they have to listen to and understand what a Pakistani, Jamaican, Morroccan, Nicaraguan, or East-end Londoner says in English, they don't have a clue, because all they have heard are Americans and Canadians speaking.

Communicating the idea, meaning, or content of the message is more important than what the damno words sound like when they come out of your mouth and into someone else's ears.

[Norman Bethune]

Believing that there is a better English "accent" than others, is a mistake that Chinese School Administrators, Employers, and Government Agencies make all the time.

In Canada and America and Australia and Britain and South Africa and New Zealand and India there are countless english "native speaker" accents (as opposed to dialects). Then there are the numerous accents which non-native second language learners speak with.

Chinese students are so keen to learn the "right accent" to speak with, that they can mimic an American or Ozzie very well. But when they have to listen to and understand what a Pakistani, Jamaican, Morroccan, Nicaraguan, or East-end Londoner says in English, they don't have a clue, because all they have heard are Americans and Canadians speaking.

Communicating the idea, meaning, or content of the message is more important than what the damno words sound like when they come out of your mouth and into someone else's ears.

[Roger]

I always thought it was my job to correct their too obvious pronunciation errors, and that alone takes a lot more time than helping them acquire a "proper" native English.

For Chinese to learn to identify long vowels and syllables beside short ones is quite a feat, given that by the time we are their teachers they have been exposed to years upon years of CHinese English instruction and fossilised English.

Then, the Chinese have obvious trouble pronouncing the THs (of which there are rumoured to be two), the S and SH sounds as well as the Z, R and even a good pronuncaiation of C.
Add to this the challenge of teaching them to speak with a natural emotional intonation and fluency - and you have no time to think about which English would be the best for them!

[Atlas]

Thank u all,

This was settled long ago, and confirmed by Ludwig, Philo, Prawn and Capergirl, Slat (and any other ex member you can think of who isn't here to refute it) that the Kentucky accent is the world leader, I'm satisfied with their academic conclusion.

please allow me to reiterate the thrust of my query....

There have been numerous debates here in the past about standard accents, preferential accents, and all that. I am not so interested in that debate as i am in giving my students advice about comprehending english in a diversity of contexts. They are working professionals and under pressure from JV managers, etc, to just understand everything ASAP from people of various backgrounds. Now you and I know this is unreasonable to assume it can be done quickly or that managerial pressure or sheer quantity could even speed language acquisition--but I can relate with their pressure to improve, and I want to tell them more than just "give it time". Is there any other way to encourage them? Give them progress, or expose them to some systematic accent learning system?

As we say in the boondocks, thanks ya'll, come on back now ya hear?

[ContemporaryDog]

My school seems to favour US accents now. In my first term we had one person from Sheffield, one Brummie, one Kenyan and one Ghanaian/American (with a sort of mixed African/US accent) as well as 2 americans.

Everyone left after that term apart from me, and all the other new teachers they have since got (apart from one quite RP-speaking English bloke) have been north american.

PErsonally I think English English is vastly superior, but then I am a tad biased...

It annoys me that we invented the language and the Chinese look down upon our version of it.

[Chris_Crossley]

[Ailian]

[deezy]

One of my students told me he'd like to speak English with an American accent. I told him whatever he did he'd always speak with a Chinese accent.

[Spiderman Too]

"G'Dye To-dye!"

Each year the US military visit Australia for 'war games'. The exercises are undertaken in central Australia, which is largely a barren desert uninhabited apart from a handful of nomadic Aborigines.

On one such event, one of the American fighter planes got into trouble forcing the pilot to eject. Despite the parachute, the pilot hit the ground with some force knocking him out.

An Aboriginal woman happened along and managed to drag the pilot back to her shanty. The pilot remained unconscious overnight, but awoke the following morning just as the woman was wiping his face with a damp cloth.

Typical of the central Australian nomadic Aborigines, she was topless with elongated boobs swinging close to her knees.

"My God!" screamed the pilot, "Am I in hell?"
"No mate! Ya in me 'ome!"
"Did ..... did you bring me her to die?"
"No mate. I brought ya 'ere yester-dye!"

Boom! Boom!

[enigma]

To avoid having to respond to the serious questions and debates brought up in this thread, I'd simply like to mention that:

In my school in China (where they employed Brits, Malaysians, Americans, Kiwis, Aussies, Kenyans and Indians) they told me, "We can understand you. You Canadians speak clearly."

That is all.

[Brian Caulfield]

I had this problem in South Korea . I asked them what part of the United States did they want their accents to come from . New England or Boston accent. "Im fom Bastan" New York " I got in my ca (car) and drove to dirty dirt (Thirty Third ) street and got some beah (beer) . Or the southern drawl where two sylable words are made into five sylables . Then the Texan drawl where a simple sentence like " We went fishin in the creek " Can take 5 minutes to complete. Or the now famous Valley girl accent that is incomprehensible to anyone over fifty.
So the reply I got from those in the know is that the midwest Iowa accent is the best . Now this form of speech will enable your students to communicate freely with a population of about 400,000 people

[Atlas]

Thank you, thank you all,

I'm really not looking for a debate about accents.

I'm not looking for an accent to teach. I dont care about standards or criteria for judging, we had several long debates about it last year.

My students have to do business with people from all over the world. They are having difficulty synthesizing understanding. They cannot pick and choose their clients' plethora of nations and regions. This presents a LISTENING problem that I want to address.

I am ALL FOR healthy debate about accents. But please start a different thread for that. I want my students to practice listening comprehension among many accents, not to tell them to concentrate on "the american" or the "british", which is an academic debate. My students have angry bosses who have little patience for their misunderstandings, and they dont enjoy the job security we do (scary, huh?). I only want to give them some advice about some way to prepare for the listening problems that arise. Some way to give them a leg up.

There are more accents in English than there are french fries in France. I agree that students should be exposed to a variety of natural sounding speech, though I would not teach my students the Kentucky drawl because I know full well it would be a liability in business with Britains and people from the Northern US, for instance. I prefer to teach them to speak as clearly as possible. However for the purposes of this thread I am more interested in ways to expose them to some kind of varied-accent listening practice or system. Does anyone know of one? Or are there some kind of basic short cuts?

Thanks again to all!

Atlas