Buckland Weekly: #1 Accent

Note

In this series of posts I intend to address various questions that teachers, both old and new, have raised with me from time to time. All my answers are based on a combination of my own experience as a teacher, both in China and the UK, and published studies. Because of the element of personal experience all posts should be treated as my opinion only. As they say on the internet, your mileage may vary.

1. Accent

I have done the orientation training for English-speaking teachers from many countries. Sources vary in their estimates but English is generally shown as having about 360 million native speakers and as many as a billion non-native speakers. I have worked with teachers from most of the countries that we consider “native” – UK, USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland – as well as teachers who have English as a second language to a high degree of proficiency. Naturally this means that I hear a lot of different accents.

As native, or proficient non-native, speakers we find it easy, in most cases, to understand what is said regardless of accent. Even the inclusion of words specific to an unfamiliar dialect might only throw us for a moment or two. Accent does, however, raise some important questions in EFL.

Does accent actually matter in the classroom?

Will a teacher's accent have any effect on the students?

How will changing to a teacher with a different accent affect the students?

Should we teach in our own native dialect or try to use a standardised form of English?

What should we do about regional variations in spelling and vocabulary?*

Perhaps most important of all...

Will an accent affect your chances of getting an EFL job?

Well, the first thing to remember is that everybody, speaking in any language at all, has an accent. There's no such thing as an accentless speaker.  Now your English accent may be closer to one of the so-called “prestige” varieties of English than another teacher's accent but that doesn't make it better, just different.

So let’s try to answer those questions.

As with most things, the answer is… it depends. If your accent is one of the few that is truly impenetrable even to native speakers then yes, it will matter, it will affect the students and you should do something about it. However you can’t eradicate your accent completely. My West Midlands accent is much softer than it once was but it’s still there. My vowel sounds will mark me forever as from Wolverhampton. Yours, unless you are a trained actor or voice coach, will mark you with your home town. Will it affect the students? Well, yes, of course it will. Their greatest exposure to English before you has probably been to Chinese English teachers with Chinese accents. You could well be the first real native speaker they have heard outside the movies. One thing about Chinese students is they are great sound mimics. When they repeat things back to you it will be with your vowel sounds, your stress patterns and your intonation.  In short, they will pick up your accent. If they change to a new teacher with a different accent they will rapidly adopt the new teacher’s accent. None of this is a problem as long as they can understand you.

What can you do?

Well, what you can’t do is try to adopt a higher prestige accent. It takes a lot of skill to consistently mimic an accent that you don’t naturally have. In class, purely for demonstration, I can manage – for very short periods – to take a stab at both Lowland and Highland Scots accents, Welsh accents and, on a good day Liverpool or London, and of course RP, but to a native speaker I come over as someone trying to do a charmless and borderline offensive comedy routine. I couldn’t manage more than a few sentences if my life depended on it.

The same is true of RP. Now RP – Received Pronunciation – is the UK’s prestige dialect. It’s what used to be, in less egalitarian days, the accent of BBC newsreaders. Nowadays, of course, even the mighty BBC acknowledges that regional accents are not necessarily a bad thing. All the same you are unlikely to hear a presenter with an especially broad version of the low-prestige accents (like mine).

So, what should you do? There are a number of things.

Speak slowly. I can’t emphasise this enough. It’s pretty much impossible to speak too slowly.

Enunciate clearly. Make sure that you aren’t squashing syllables or missing them out altogether.

Many accents have this feature.

Use your own accent but be aware of it. Try to catch yourself when you say something that only your grandmother would understand.

Avoid dialect words. Use standard words instead. If I told a student that his work was “bostin’” instead of “very good” it wouldn’t help anyone.

Above all be aware of the students. If you pay attention to the class it’s easy to see when they can’t understand you. If that happens ask yourself why. Check that you are speaking slowly and clearly enough.

Repeat and paraphrase. Students may need several attempts to follow what you said.

The bottom line is that accent matters in the classroom but only to a degree. Slow clear speech, regardless of accent, will usually be sufficient. Don’t worry if you sound like a Californian or a New Yorker or if your accent forever identifies you as from Melbourne or Dublin or Cape Town. It doesn’t matter as long as you are clear.

And then, of course, there’s that all important question of your job prospects. I’d be lying if I said that your accent has no effect on them – of course it does. Some school administrators prefer certain accents and dislike others. It isn’t rational or fair but it is the way things are. If you are a native speaker always apply the same rules to talking to your school as I outlined above for your students. It will help. For non-native speakers there is the extra task of making sure that your spoken grammar fits in with the norm. I have sometimes trained French and German speaking teachers who have, as is common, applied the word order of their native languages to English – putting adjectives after nouns instead of before, or shifting the verb position to later in the sentence. Schools won’t care for that, though it isn’t really a matter of accent. If your grammar is standard though, then, native or not, your accent shouldn’t be much of a problem.

*I will deal with regional spelling and vocabulary variations in another post.