Job Discussion Forums

[foreignertobe]

The quality of the Chinese teachers at my school varies of course, and they all certainly try hard at planning their games for classes, but I'm having a major dilemma with getting them to change some of the more unacceptable parts of their "accent" (which, by the way, they have asked me to do from time to time).

I say "accent" because anytime they say something incorrectly, it's because "they're not a native speaker." There are countless small mistakes which would not create confusion, such as pronouncing "chair" like "chur," but then there are the more egregious errors, such as making a long vowel short, thereby saying an entirely different word altogether. They call this an "accent," but it is akin to an American French teacher pronouncing "les" as "less" would be said in English. An accent would be to say it as the English "lay" would be said with no change from one's English accent, but pronouncing it "less" would simply be a mistake. I honestly could not imagine getting in front of a class in the US and teaching beginning French students to pronounce "les" as "less" and then blame it on my nationality.

For words containing a difficult sound, such as the variants of "th," slack must be cut with the expectation that they'lll at least try to learn how to make the sound. But when they can easily pronounce the sound but simply don't, accent or misake, is it acceptable for an English teacher to make such mistakes repeatedly, even when teaching the word in isolation?

And who can even mention that they have learned English for years and have somehow not realized that stressing a word can change its meaning within a sentence beyond just expressing emotion.

[StayingPower]

It's certainly not an 'astute crowd' you're working for then as it's a common objective here to improve pronunciation. There are certain 'areas of weakness' in any pronunciation from one language to another, and they should know these weakpoints. My school certainly does.

Otherwise, bring it to the attention of your manager. It's should be stressed. But don't think of it as an 'accent', since this in itself is a misnomer. It's 'dialects' you're referring to when comparing their errors, and tell them we have no such 'dialects' that pronounce these words as such.

If I were to say a Southerner from the US had an accent he would say the same for me. So who really has an accent? We speak different dialects of English.