Well, week 3 is almost over and things are going fine. It's been a week of some excellent discussions. An interesting question came up this week. It had to do with authentic English. What is "authentic" English? Whose English is authentic? If students are watching a video, made in America in which the actors are using "Valley" English--is that authentic? If students are watching a movie that is filled with slang and inappropriate language, this that authentic and good for them? I wonder. How authentic does the language have to be? How do we get authentic language to our students?
Another question that came up concerning pronunciation is what accent (American? British? Canadian? Australian? etc.) do we teach our students and how accent-free do we wish them to be? Isn't it unfair and impossible to ask our students to be error-free in their pronunciation? How great a tolerance should we have when we grade our students? Shouldn't we go for intelligibility? What's the "right" accent?
Anyway, these are questions that came up for me this week. I'm finding it intesting to ponder
them.
Dear Donna,
ReplyDeleteI feel no one can be 'accent free' and that having a native-like accent is not important. What is important is intelligibility. If your speech is intelligible and others can understand what you are saying,no matter what accent you have, that serves the purpose!
Akifa
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ReplyDeleteDear Donna and Akifa,
ReplyDeleteI wish to contribute to this discussion and share my thoughts with you.
I myself don't and probably will never speak as a native speaker. On the other hand, I try to respect all the language components in order to get as intelligible as possible. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that we learn language in order to use it in real situations, therefore we need to work on sharpening our skills.
What's more, we have to be aware of close connection of non verbal and verbal characteristic of speech but sometimes, in order to reinforce listening -> speaking, we can practice them separately.
Furthermore, there are many accents in the World, not only in Anglo-Saxon countries. In my humble view, it is important to distinguish non-native and native accents. I believe that we have to support native ones. Why? Because non-native speakers tend to make 'their own mistakes'. For example, they don’t' distinguish different sounds that don’t exist in their mother tongue and they frequently use intonation they borrow from their mother tongue. This is where we teachers must 'react'.
Apart from that, when babies are born, they learn language as people learn foreign languages. Every language has its acoustic components. These are: Rhythm, Stress, Intonation, Intensity, Tempo and Pause and we should obey them.
Besides, if we don't respect the nature of language our communication may break and our collocutor won’t be able to follow. As Joan Morley , in her book "Acquisition, instruction, standards, variation, and accent", said: ''Even when the listener does understand the speaker, the presence of an accent that is difficult to understand can produce anxiety in the listener that he will not understand what comes next, and cause him to end the conversation earlier or avoid difficult topics.'' Going from my experience, ‘communication partners’ get easily bored under these circumstances.
However, speaking is just one piece of a puzzle when it comes to language learning, and we should keep it in perspective.
Nonetheless, we are here to guide our students and help them select better models of authentic language and point out desirable accents.
Kind regards,
Karolina