Steve's Blog - 10th February 2010

Teaching pronunciation

What accent should a teacher have?

As a teacher of English as a foreign language in Thailand, schools that employ you and the students you teach are aiming, above all else, to learn how to pronounce English words like you do. Of course, our students need to learn more than just pronunciation – they also need to learn grammar, vocabulary and how to put everything together to communicate. But what many of our learners in Thailand would really like very much is to sound English – and that is why they need you!

But if teaching pronunciation is such an integral part of our job as English teachers, there is a problem. Our students say they want an English accent. But English, as you know, doesn't have 'an accent'. The Queen, of course, has a lovely accent. But is her English more English than someone from Australia? Or South Africa? Or Edinburgh? Or Texas? If you speak English at home, and have always done so, chances are you speak it very well, but very differently to almost every other English speaker on the planet except for those who come from the same district as you. A sentence like 'Let's take a bus' sounds different in New York, Leeds and Singapore, but each of the speakers in these cities will understand the other, regardless of these differences.

So if we are going to teach English, what accent do students want? Which accent is correct? Is it ok to have a cockney accent, for example? What if you are from Holland, and have a Dutch accent; is that ok? Should we say 'to-mah-to' like the Queen does, or 'to-may-to' like Brad Pitt?

As an international language, English has an enormous spread across the globe, and is subject to fantastic variation within fairly narrow bounds. The result is a language that is mutually comprehensible, but different from place to place. Linguistically, then, there is no 'right' or 'wrong' accent. We may tease Canadians for the way they say 'house', a Yorkshireman for his way of saying 'pub', or New Zealanders for their pronunciation of 'mint', but they are, actually not wrong – just different.

So what do our students want? What accent should we use? Well, the answer is easy: we should use our own. The key, though, is that we are easily understood. When our accents make it difficult for others to understand us, it's a problem. I once taught with a teacher from Scotland. Obviously, he sounded very Scottish when speaking to his students, but was completely incomprehensible when speaking to his mother on the phone. “What language are you speaking?”, I asked. “English, of course”, he replied, “I speak English at home”. This teacher, fortunately, was able to moderate his accent for the students (and me!) so that although we could clearly tell he was Scottish, that didn't get in the way of his communication with us.

And as for the 'to-mah-to' problem. Well, we all need to be aware that English is wonderfully diverse, and there are multiple ways of saying things. Criticizing other English accents and calling them 'wrong' serves no purpose. We need to have the flexibility as English teachers to know that a 'CV' is also a resume and that ketchup can also be called 'to-mah-to' sauce.

And make no mistake, learning to speak English is a tough task for our learners. Subtle differences in our accents isn't going to make a lot of difference if we are focusing on the real task at hand: attuning students to the sounds of English, the way we stress our words and sentences, and the our intonation patterns. Want to know more about these? Come find out!

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