Language Bubble

Many that are involved in language – teachers and learners both - are hung up on the pronunciation aspects of things. Most of these people focus on the learner and how to improve their accent in their target language, and this is something that a lot of people are interested in. It’s the old ultimate attainment argument. Everyone dreams of sounding like a native!

You can umm and arr all you want about this, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. And if asked candidly, many a learner (I focus on Asian Englishes remember) will tell you that they want to disguise their origins and sound like a native. No amount of persuasive debate can change their mind, even if we are to consider that English speakers from different countries are likely to have markers that identify them as being from there and not only that, but these markers are accepted in the English-speaking world… And shock-horror… even native speakers have these same markers… 

In any case, there’s been a long push in Communicative Language Teaching practice to move away from perfection to intelligibility… and this covers pronunciation as well as the other skills and components of language. But still, no matter how much we try to convince our students that sounding like a native isn’t needed nor is it necessarily the best thing, they’re just not interested.

Anyway, this argument aside, what about the teacher and their pronunciation? If our students are still striving for the Standard English pronunciation, what are the odds of the teacher having this same Standard English pronunciation? Close to nil when you consider that less than 4% of the British population speak with RP… I’m unsure of the figures on General American English (GAE) speakers, but I would guess they’re also in the minority.

A study I’m currently conducting looks at multiple Englishes from the perspective of the Korean learner of English, and the study is showing that the learners believe a BBC English speaker or an almost GAE speaker to be the “best”. This is the style they want to learn. The style they find easiest to understand. The style they want their teacher to have. But… these are people in the minority. So what of reality and their teacher with sub-standard English?

Here’s a solution that will never take seed… perhaps the teacher should be the one working on their pronunciation and not the student. It’s a little wacky, yes… but we are teachers and we are here to facilitate our students, so why not?

If we as teachers can standardise a little more and give our students something that they seem to want, then it’s kind of making our job a little more rewarding and maybe even a little easier. Yes, exposure to multiple varieties is key to wide-ranging comprehension, but exposure to a standardised form is also key as the learner isn’t having to acclimatise to a different variety each time a new teacher steps into the classroom… and at least they could understand TV if not the people

Thoughts on this? Pronunciation training for the teacher before the student?

NB: This is directed at L1 English-speaking teachers by the way… the issue of L2 English-speaking teachers and pronunciation is another issue relating to a realistic model of pronunciation that I’ll post about soon.