The third week of our course is going to be over. We have been exploring aural/oral methods and reading different articles about training pronunciation and teaching our kids that there are a lot of dialects and accents in English. Sometimes British and Americans misunderstand each other not to mention non-native speakers of English.
Thus I sometimes make my pupils listen to different tapescripts recorded by Australians, Scottish, Canadians, etc, and they complain that the accents of the speakers "are not very good". Besides, in Israel American English is much more popular although this land used to be a part of the British Empire. The State of Israel was established in 1948 and the British English has been forgotten for 65 years - that is incredible! Most Israelis try to speak Englih with the American pronunciation and use such words as "elevator" instead of "lift", "railroad" instead of "railway", etc. And they often pronounce "r" in such words as "car", "far", "Denver", etc.
All the students know that I am not a native speaker. Moreover, I immigrated from the former Soviet Union many years ago and my native language is Russian. Unlike Japanese kids described in one of the article by Jonathan Snell, some young Israelis lack political correctness and say they wish I was American. Moreover, some hyperactive and hot-tempered kids say: "No Russian accents! Only American". Mainly new students say so, but step-by-step they get used to my accent and way of teaching and become very interested in my lessons.
In contrast to Japanese students, their Israeli peers are very talkative and almost never afraid of making mistakes. Moreover, sometimes they talk too much and it is difficult to catch their attention. Of course, they make a lot of grammar mistakes and mispronounce words which cause some misunderstanding, but they like group activities. In this perspective I think that training pronunciation via the range of sites will work well, so that they will be provided "the right accent" and "the necessary English" since they consider all other "Englishes" non-correct except North American.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
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It is incredible Julia to discover the numerous similarities we have in our teaching and relation with our students!
ReplyDeleteWe are also confronted to this prevalence of American English among our students.
They watch and listen to so many American series , American icons, American Music groups that they do not understand when teachers have a different accent !
Moreover , The American accent is "cool"for them .
However , as we are very close to England , the majority of English teachers have a British accent but more and more young teachers speak with the American accent and use American English vocabulary .
Unfortunately , even if we try to focus on a good pronunciation (English or American ) in class , our students speak with a very strong French accent ! One of the main reason is that we only have 2 hours a week with our students to teach them English !
Yes, that's true that non-native speakers have their own accents although they focus on a good pronunciation. My students also speak with a very strong Hebrew accent and when they listen to me they say that I have a Russian accent.
DeleteBefore I immigrated, I studied at university in Ukraine and our professors worked really hard to make us speak with the classical British pronunciation. And after the immigration I tried to speak with the American accent.
By the way, it seems to me that the French are not very good at English, are they? I was in Paris many years ago and I was really surprised that the local residents didn't speak English or spoke it very little.