Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. I'm joined again today by Robin Monce and Jordanka, and we're going to be continuing our conversation about teaching English pronunciation.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: For a global world.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: So last episode, we introduced the topic of pronunciation and intelligibility, and international intelligibility, and why it's more important to focus on being understood than it is on native speaker accents. And I want this episode to jump a bit more into the idea of accent and identity because we talked a little bit about it, came up a couple times, accent prejudice in the last episode, and I'd like to go into the importance of that and the importance of identity a little bit more.
So I suppose my opening question is for you two. Your dagger Monse, which is thinking back, what was it like learning pronunciation growing up? And also, I suppose, a follow up question. Do you find that your non native accent affects your experience of English?
I imagine the answer that is yes. But how do you find it affects your experience of English?
[00:01:17] Speaker C: Yeah, gosh, two really interesting questions.
When I started learning English, of course, I wanted to start to sound like a native speaker.
I suppose it's part of you are on a journey, you're learning something, you want to achieve the best, and you have a benchmark, or you have a target, a goal. And when I was learning English, it was the native speaker.
But then, I don't know.
With age, I suppose you become wiser, and life experiences do help to change perspectives and to see a different. To see yourself differently. And actually, I really like my accent, and I'm not, as long as I'm intelligible, which is not always the case.
That's another story, how we help our listeners and how we help them understand what we say. I think I'm not aspiring to a native speaker accent, and I'm very grateful to be working in a place where it's very international. People are very welcoming and very appreciative and accommodating when it comes to my accent. But the reality is that I live in England and I still have situations where I'm in the shop or in a restaurant at the moment. People pick up my accent, it's like a curtain falls, and they decided there is no way they're going to be able to understand my accent.
So, yes, it's a bit of a love hate relationship, it has to be said. But broadly, I see it as part of my identity. I like the fact that people can pick out my non english eastern european accent, though very often people say, are you from Poland? I was like, surely not. Your accent is so different from my accent.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: How can you be thinking that I'm guilty of that?
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Oh, have you said that as well?
[00:03:10] Speaker B: I just assumed it.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Did you? I'm bulgarian.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Yes, I know.
[00:03:17] Speaker C: To me, when I listen to a polish person, they sound very different.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: That is such a british thing, though, of just being unable to place accents anywhere outside of Britain.
[00:03:25] Speaker C: I mean, the british culture, again, going off on a tangent, but british culture, people like to classify you to put you where you are. It's part of how society works, you know. Are you. Yeah, because labels and. Yeah, how we relate to people. So it is very interesting having an accent and living in England, there are, in the workplace, it's never been an obstacle. At least I don't think it has been an obstacle. But in the wider world out there with shop assistants and waitress and. Yeah, probably it's been a little bit like. Surely you can understand what I'm saying.
[00:04:01] Speaker D: Yeah, of course, of course. Well, my situation is different because I don't live in England, I live in Spain.
And the thing there is that you have to prove all the time, if you want to be an english teacher, you have to prove your accent. I mean, it's not only that, you know about teaching that you are fluent enough and that you've got all your certificates and everything in place. It's like, yes, but you're not a native speaker. And sometimes you feel hurt sometimes because you think, I'm sure I can help students a lot because I've been through this whole process. I mean, I started from scratch and I've been learning, I've been facing the difficulties and I think I've overcome many of them. So I think I'm a good model and like me, I mean, there are many teachers around the world in the same situation. But still I think this is changing, which is good. I can see there's a new wave of people thinking that non native english speakers can be good teachers, but still there are many institutions that ask for a native speaker because is the role model to follow, is the target, as you are saying, your danker. So it is changing, but it's still there.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: I think the accent identity thing is the bit of this whole shift that has been least explored. Yeah, it's very complex.
And some of the attempts at finding out what students want have been, I think, rather simplistic.
And it's sort of like, if you could choose, which accent would you have? A native speaker accent, an intelligible, non native speaker accent. And C and D are distractors more than anything, you know? And then they publish. 70% of the students said they wanted a native speaker accent.
It's a little bit more complex than that.
[00:06:24] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: And if you actually were able to give people a native speaker accent and they were to be taken as native speakers, as they opened their mouths and spoke, they might get a shock as to what that means, because if you are identified as being a native speaker from the north, from the United States, for example, or from Australia, from wherever the appropriate model is, you are then given a whole lot of cultural values which might not be your values.
[00:06:53] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Now, that doesn't happen because most people don't get to native speaker pronunciation. But in Poland, I did actually spend two days with a bloke that I kept thinking, I'm sure they said, and gave a polish name, but he's obviously from sort of upper middle class England.
And it was so conflicting for me.
[00:07:15] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: That I couldn't work out who this person was and why I should have been given what seemed to me a very polish name. So there was someone who had achieved what is apparently the goal of everybody, but had already created a new set of problems by achieving it because he was disconcerting to be with.
And then you start thinking, why on earth would you want to speak like that? You know, there's a whole bunch of accents in England. Why did you choose that one? And that sort of thing?
It's very complex. I look at myself, I would love to disappear in terms of accent in my Spanish and just be from the north of Spain, but then I live in Spain. This is my community. And the accent that I'm seeking and will never achieve after 42 years in Spain, you know, it only takes a taxi driver two minutes, and then immediately, where are you from? You're not from here, are you? This is such a damaging thing. You're not from here, are you? That's such an awful thing to be.
I want that accent because this is my community and I want to be a member of it. And the accents, the last thing that stops me being a member of that community. But after 42 years, it is absolutely the community I want to be part of. But most people aren't in that situation. I remember in an e list discussion with pronunciation experts, very, very prestigious phonetician here from the UK said, well, you know, when I learn German, I want to speak German like the Germans.
Sorry, you've missed the point. German is not an international language.
Yeah, you're not used. You're not learning German in order to go to the world and speak to the world in German. You're learning German in order to go to Germany. And so it's a different situation.
[00:09:08] Speaker C: It's interesting, that sense of belonging and being part of the community. And as you say, you live in Spain, I live in England. So we're speaking a foreign language. Well, foreign is the wrong word, probably here, but we're speaking a different language to our mother tongue or our first language. And there is that sense of, you know, how you fit into society, how you identify yourself. So I think undoubtedly there will be learners of English who find themselves in that situation where we have English as a second language in the US, in the UK, in Canada. So you have lots of people. So for them, probably a native speaker accent would be an objective, and it should be an important objective because it gives you that sense of belonging as well. But we also know, when we were working on the position paper, we also know that about 80% of interactions are between non native speakers. So for 80% of the learners of English that are out there, this is unlikely to be their target and really shouldn't be their target.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: No, no.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: And if you speak.
My students were all students of tourism, so they're going out to ultimately manage.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: The world of tourism and they're going to be.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: But they represent Spain.
[00:10:19] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: So if they speak English and are intelligible and sound like they're spanish, you might actually think, oh, I'm in Spain, and this. This wonderful person who's helping me is Spanish. Yeah, it's the real deal. I just read something about restaurants here in Britain. They're italian restaurants. They can't get italian. I saw that they've all gone back to Italy and the customers are complaining because the waiting staff do not sound italian. Okay, so here is your accent, your italian accent as you speak English, verifying the quality of the product in this restaurant.
[00:10:54] Speaker E: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:55] Speaker C: But interesting about identity, because I think it would be remiss of us not to say that there is bias.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: And it's huge.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: Yes, there is there.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:05] Speaker C: I remember in the position paper game when we were working on it, we were talking about the fact that your interlocutor, the person you're speaking to, or you're having a discussion, or your boss, there could be an element of, I'm not going to listen to you because I actually. Because of the accents you're bringing with you. And it doesn't actually need to be a foreign accent. It could be original. Accent, as you were saying earlier, that you are discouraged to use your Geordie accent because they might prevent you from progressing in your career the way you want it to progress. And I heard this so many times, so that bias is still there.
So.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yes, but the bias is still there. And you can sort of say, and therefore I will train my students to speak in the way, which is prestigious in that part of the world when they speak English and they avoid the bias.
I think that's the wrong reaction. The reaction has to be just as there is legislation against bias to do with race, colour, Creedde, there has to be legislation, as there is in Canada, against accent prejudice.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: So it's a little bit out of our hands as teachers. It needs legislation, and people should be able to be taken to court if it can be demonstrated that they were biased against you, prejudiced against you because of your accent.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: But then you say, it's out of our hands. But at the same time, I actually think, like, culturally, that shift in the way we teach and the values we have is slowly making those changes happen, or at least encouraging them, I guess.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: I think so. I mean, when I first started talking about this as a teacher trainer, teacher educator, you could see there was a lot of skepticism amongst teachers, and that's changed.
And the whole sort of scene is far more receptive as people. There was an interesting piece of research done out of Leeds metropolitan University by a bloke called Iva Timas, and he asked students what they felt and what they wanted from their accents. And initially, when he analyzed his results, then it was like 70% of the students said they wanted a prestige native speaker accent. Then when you broke it down further and you took away out of circle countries, and you separated out of circle countries from expanding circle countries, the speakers of English from outer circle countries were much more confident about their accent in English. So indian English speakers of English had no problems and had no desire whatsoever to sound English, English with an arp accent. And it was students from the outer circle countries who were clearly much less confident about their use of English that were much more interested in sounding like native speakers. And again, we were talking about that last night over supper, that Spain, for example, is a country where there's almost.
We didn't use the term last night, but I think it's an inferiority complex.
We're not quite good enough yet. We were 40 years out of the world and we haven't caught up with Europe. And so a lot of students in Spain still sort of hanker after the golden the native speaker accent. And then I can.
When you get confident about who you are in the world, you will, I think, also be confident about your accent.
[00:14:33] Speaker E: Yes.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: You, I don't think, get too many german speakers of English apologizing for sounding German. Now, if you come from a powerhouse country like Germany, you have your accent, you use English. It's this tool I have. And they're much more pragmatic about this, and they're not at all worried about being identified as being German because they're proud of being German. And we're still in that bit where we're trying to make, convince ourselves in Spain that we're actually okay. We do some things quite well.
[00:15:03] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hope this will eventually change. I think we are getting new generations better prepared and we are exposed to social media, and this is changing everything. I think the exposure we had, like, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, was the cassettes. The cassettes and some videotapes that you watched over and over again.
And now we can listen to people from all over the world and speaking English and we understand them.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: And do you know what happens? And my students would report this to me once they got on the Internet and started talking to tourism students around the world, they would come up and if they felt they had a good enough relationship with me, which was, most of my students would say, look, don't take this the wrong way, but when we're on the Internet together, it's fine. Until a native speaker comes in, we haven't a clue what they're saying, and they don't seem to understand us.
[00:16:09] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:16:11] Speaker C: All the many stories where we've been, you know, a group of non native speakers with one or two native speakers, and everyone understands each other apart from native speakers. Yes, I've seen that. And it's astonishing, isn't it? And I think, I don't know. I don't think it's that inferiority that we're talking about. The deficiency. You just learn to accommodate and you just learn to adjust. So as a second language speaker, you're a little bit more adjusted to what needs to happen, and you're more forgiving, I suppose, as well.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Well, I suppose, as well.
It's about the communicative burden as well and the fact that native speakers don't take on as much of it, I guess.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: I remember reading this.
God, Rasani, lippy Green.
So it's gone to a third edition, this book, but this is from 1997, and the book was called English with an accent. And it was all about accent prejudice in the United States.
And actually, the dedication is beautiful in the book because you open it, and there it is. It says, to my father, whose accent I never heard. And so her father was obviously lippy and italian and married an american woman. And there she grows up hearing two accents in the house, and one is an italian english accent, and she never heard it because it was just the norm. But anyway, this thing that she introduced about the idea of, if we're talking to each other, there is this burden of understanding each other. We can share it out. And I make an effort to understand toy restaurant and so on. Things like that we accommodate to each other.
And then this was such, you know, there are paragraphs that you read that you go, oh, wow. And you feel very stupid afterwards because you think it's obvious. But it wasn't obvious till you read the paragraph. And in this paragraph, she explains how the most competent member of the communication surely has to do the moving around in order for the communication to be successful. And she said, so many native speakers do not move and place the burden of adjusting on the non native speaker, who's clearly less competent in the language. They're busy learning the language, and this is what my tourism students kept bumping up against when they would.
[00:18:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I think this is shifting a little bit again because of global world people becoming even more open minded. And, you know, the number of times I was in Germany last week, and we speak very bad German, so we don't speak very good Germany in our family, so we would have to switch to English from time to time. And every time I found myself saying, well, your English is much better than my German, so just go for it. And I've heard this many times, actually, around me, people saying, well, you know, your English is much better than my Bulgarian or my Spanish or my Italian.
So people are starting to change, no.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Two ways about it. But yes, I actually, the whole journey, you see, you get into the airport, and as you come through the airport, you're seeing people at the airport dealing with people who are arriving with multiple different levels of English. And you can see this. Oh, they've just rephrased that completely. Isn't that lovely?
[00:19:24] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Or you see, they've just repeated the same words with a slightly more angry voice that's no good at all. But louder, louder. Foreigners talk to them loud. But mostly it's really lovely to watch, actually, the way people are adjusting and, well, it's a professional skill you should have in a place like an airport, but it's one that wasn't there 30 years ago, and it is there now, actually.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, don't forget to like and subscribe. Or if you want to take a deep dive into pronunciation teaching, try our book teaching english pronunciation for a global world by Robin Walker and Gemma Archer. Just follow the link in the description. Thanks.
