Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ella]

Has anyone found any of the American accent training books and CDs at Amazon.com to be effective with Koreans, or do you have a favorite book/CD elsewhere?

[Woden]

Have your students asked to sound American?

Seeing as they will never sound American, are you not setting them up to fail? Would be better to model your natural English to them and if they can achieve intelligibility then leave it at that...

...if they are demanding a US accent then fair enough, it is their money they are wasting.

[xeno439]

http://www.languagesearch.org/Accent-Training/American-Accent/

Here is all I could find.

[butlerian]

Come on...let's not enforce the view among Koreans that American English is the only - or most important - English to learn. British English is growing in important, and it is necessariy to understand other accents if the English learned is going to be universally useful.

Of course...there are some situations when learning specifically American English (or whatever kind of English) is useful, but it shouldn't be taught as a general rule.

[ella]

Thanks, xeno439. Have you used the program at Americanaccent.com?

I know there are lots of different accent-training programs out there, I'm looking for anyone who's had success with a specific program and Koreans.

[xeno439]

No, I don't need to use that program. Keep Googling. I did find a free one once. I wanted to teach my KGF how to speak like an American, but I never went through with it.

[xtchr]

Just tell them to pinch their nose shut and double the volume.








Of course I'm only joking (kind of...)

[unknown9398]

[Jizzo T. Clown]

[sojourner1]

Of course, Koreans could set up hagwons in the states and have students study 6 months to a year at them to gain American English fluency. In fact, some wealthy Korean parents do send their kids over to Canada or the states for 6 months which is the only reason why our hagwon loses students.

[Tony_Balony]

This is an important area, one that is not researched well. Immigrants who move to the US, esp those in professional positions really want to lose their accent. Many of the programs offered really do work and a accent reduction clinic would go over were here in Korea.

[littlelisa]

I have a great book for teaching standard North American pronunciation. The good thing is that it does address world Englishes, and it's still good even if you're teaching another accent, because of the way they present the information.

The book is called Teaching American English Pronunciation by Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich. It's part of a seris called Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers.

What I really like about this book is that it focuses as much on suprasegmentals as on segmentals. Many books just focus on segmentals, though suprasegmentals (intonation and word/sentence stress) are surprisingly what make the biggest difference in terms of intelligibility.

It also emphasizes that you should aim for comprehensibility over perfect accent. I found this book to be very useful! It also has suggestions of other books that may be helpful at the back. I highly recommend it.

[littlelisa]

[Woden]

[littlelisa]

Yes, but even for a colony, Canada has a remarkably standard accent considering its size. The only other place that compares is New Zealand and it's much smaller. Compare Canada's standard English to the US, which has a lot more variation.

French Quebecers still speak like French people did back in the 1700s. It's really interesting. But there's a lot of variation for sure. Probably as much as you'd find in England, which again, is uncommon since it is a colony.

You're thinking of Newfies maybe? Newfies are the only ones who have a different accent, and often will speak in their own dialect, which is totally incomprehensible to everyone else. It's not Gaellic, though.

Nova Scotians have a fairly standard accent.