| Pages in topic: [1 2] > | Accented teachers may be better for second language learners
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| | | Umm, that's why it's called learning | May 7, 2010 |
As a student, you are *supposed* to spend your time learning a language... so you can then use it well in real-life situations.
People often prefer the path of least resistance, but they forget that taking it easy now will make it more difficult for them in the long term.
| | | | Nicole Schnell 
United States
Local time: 01:37
English to German
+ ...
In memoriam
Honestly? This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
To this day I curse the fact that my English teachers were non-native speakers. Here I am today, an American citizen, and I yet have to encounter any stranger who will not start a conversation with "Where's your accent from?".
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Nicole Schnell wrote:
Honestly? This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
To this day I curse the fact that my English teachers were non-native speakers. Here I am today, an American citizen, and I yet have to encounter any stranger who will not start a conversation with "Where's your accent from?".
and put up with all the language/nation stereotypes...
| | | | DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
| there're no 'teachers' but lecturers | May 7, 2010 |
IMO all people speaking English (or any other) as a second foreign language are *always* with different degree of accent. So, if one wants to speak with an accent as his 'teacher' does then it's an option.
Yet once I met two men both from Chicago, but from different districts... Oh my, they spoke *very* differently. It took them some 10 min to adapt and later on they used some 'compromise dialect'. They both are native EN US speakers, but how could I consider them (or one of them) ... See more IMO all people speaking English (or any other) as a second foreign language are *always* with different degree of accent. So, if one wants to speak with an accent as his 'teacher' does then it's an option.
Yet once I met two men both from Chicago, but from different districts... Oh my, they spoke *very* differently. It took them some 10 min to adapt and later on they used some 'compromise dialect'. They both are native EN US speakers, but how could I consider them (or one of them) to be 'accented'?
Now I can find the only excuse for they were not teachers 
P.S. As for me I think it's easier to understand native speakers than 'fluent English speaking' foreign Anglicists. But tempo)
[Edited at 2010-05-07 12:01 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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Kay Barbara
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:37
Member (2008)
English to German
+ ...
| Zis is not vot ve Jermans neet! | May 7, 2010 |
Nicole Schnell wrote:
Honestly? This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
I agree, 'nuff said.
| | | | Ana Cuesta
Spain
Local time: 10:37
Member
English to Spanish
| Depends on what you mean by 'accent'? | May 7, 2010 |
If by accent one means a foreign one, I agree with the others, certainly not...
If by accent one means a regional one, as in having an English-native from say Scotland teach you English as opposed to someone speaking 'BBC English', I can see a point there but I still think that would be better left for a later stage. And even then it would be preferable to get exposed to several real-life accents and not to a particular one...
I once bought a well-reputated Spanish lea... See more If by accent one means a foreign one, I agree with the others, certainly not...
If by accent one means a regional one, as in having an English-native from say Scotland teach you English as opposed to someone speaking 'BBC English', I can see a point there but I still think that would be better left for a later stage. And even then it would be preferable to get exposed to several real-life accents and not to a particular one...
I once bought a well-reputated Spanish learning course for a boyfriend and the first lesson was salutations with a strong Andalusian accent... he couldn't recognize the salutations even he had heard them from myself lots of times.
The problem is we all have an accent, don't we? So I guess it is a matter of 'softening' it to become as neutral as possible (my Asturian accent is stronger when speaking with my family and it naturally softens when I am out of that environment) ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kaspars Melkis
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:37
English to Latvian
+ ...
| a teacher is a problem, not an accent | May 7, 2010 |
We should not misinterpret the results of the study. It doesn't say that accents are better for students. It says that teachers with accents are usually better teachers. No reasons given but I can imagine that many language schools readily accept native English speakers without due evaluation of their teaching skills. Teachers with accent, however, have harder time to find jobs and consequently they are putting more effort into teaching expertise to prove their worth. The policy of discharging t... See more We should not misinterpret the results of the study. It doesn't say that accents are better for students. It says that teachers with accents are usually better teachers. No reasons given but I can imagine that many language schools readily accept native English speakers without due evaluation of their teaching skills. Teachers with accent, however, have harder time to find jobs and consequently they are putting more effort into teaching expertise to prove their worth. The policy of discharging teachers with heavy accents can be detrimental if it is not coupled with another policy of firing other bad teachers even with flawless accents and finding better ones. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Jessica Noyes
United States
Local time: 04:37
Member
Spanish to English
+ ...
| Accented classroom teachers, yes; accented English teachers, no | May 7, 2010 |
Note that this is taking place in Arizona, where a certain bias is evident in the new law they were able to vote in.
My sense is that an accented teacher from the same langage background as the students might be very close to their cultural reality and relate to them very well. This teacher probably has been through experiences similar to those of her young charges, and has family members, too, who are struggling in a new milieu. So the teacher understands the students, and knows how ... See more Note that this is taking place in Arizona, where a certain bias is evident in the new law they were able to vote in.
My sense is that an accented teacher from the same langage background as the students might be very close to their cultural reality and relate to them very well. This teacher probably has been through experiences similar to those of her young charges, and has family members, too, who are struggling in a new milieu. So the teacher understands the students, and knows how to elicit their best achievement. They in turn, relate well to him or her, and feel at home in the classroom, and respond accordingly.
(Of course, if the accent is from a culture other than that of the students, I imagine it can be a real handicap -- a child of Asian heritage might be in real trouble in a classroom headed by a teacher with a strong Spanish accent!)
In the US, school are required to provide specialized English instruction to English language learners. These teachers *should* have near-native accents, so that the students will learn to speak with a standard accent.
Every teacher brings strengths and weaknesses to the classroom. The state of Arizona appears to be discriminating against those whose weakness is accented English, despite their teaching skills, strong student relationships, and so on. ▲ Collapse
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| Makes sense to me | May 7, 2010 |
Interesting story. I wonder whether the issue is really the accent, and not the phones / phonemes that the teacher is using. I remember an instance in Japan in which I guessed that a radio announcer was foreign, while my Japanese friends claimed his Japanese was indistinguishable from that of a native speaker. What had struck me was the "crispness" of his speech to my ear -- I found it unusually easy to catch and parse his words.
The... See more Interesting story. I wonder whether the issue is really the accent, and not the phones / phonemes that the teacher is using. I remember an instance in Japan in which I guessed that a radio announcer was foreign, while my Japanese friends claimed his Japanese was indistinguishable from that of a native speaker. What had struck me was the "crispness" of his speech to my ear -- I found it unusually easy to catch and parse his words.
The details of the study done in Israel are here: http://www.israel21c.org/201003077751/culture/putting-the-accent-on-language-perception ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Even after 34 years in the US | May 7, 2010 |
I still speak with a slight Dutch (or as I prefer to call it: a suave, sophisticated) accent in my English. Probably because I started learning English "late", at the age of 12.
Blaming your teachers for your accent is ridiculous, you would have had an accent in your English even if you had been taught by native speakers.
A friend of mine grew up in the US with parents who came to the US after surviving the holocaust and insisted everybody spoke English at home. So whe... See more I still speak with a slight Dutch (or as I prefer to call it: a suave, sophisticated) accent in my English. Probably because I started learning English "late", at the age of 12.
Blaming your teachers for your accent is ridiculous, you would have had an accent in your English even if you had been taught by native speakers.
A friend of mine grew up in the US with parents who came to the US after surviving the holocaust and insisted everybody spoke English at home. So when the kids got to kindergarten, they were the only ones speaking English with a German accent. Which has since disappeared and they're doing quite well.
Teachers who speak English with an accent, probably had to LEARN the language instead of "ingesting" it with their breakfast cereal. When you have to learn something, you'll probably do a better job explaining things to students, because you know what the sudents are going through and what they'll have problems with, since you went through the same experience. Native speakers, unless they are taught well, probably don't know what non-native speakers face.
[Edited at 2010-05-07 15:27 GMT]
[Edited at 2010-05-07 15:28 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kaspars Melkis
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:37
English to Latvian
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| teaching and translating languages require additional skills | May 7, 2010 |
Benno Groeneveld wrote:
Teachers who speak English with an accent, probably had to LEARN the language instead of "ingesting" it with their breakfast cereal. When you have to learn something, you'll probably do a better job explaining things to students, because you know what the students are going through and what they'll have problems with, since you went through the same experience. Native speakers, unless they are taught well, probably don't know what non-native speakers face.
You have a good point and I fully agree that personal experience gives a unique perspective.
I am not convinced that it is accent that is helping students because in my subjective option the best place for learning English is the ESL courses in Chicago. But in remote countries people often believe a myth that any native English speaker can teach English or that any person who speaks two languages can translate.
| | | | Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:37
French to English
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| This appears to be nonesense journalism | May 9, 2010 |
I think there's a lot of Chinese whispers going on here, and it seems like the journalists involved haven't actually read the paper in question. The "new study", actually a paper called "Listening with an Accent: Speech Perception in a Second Language by Late Bilinguals" published in the October 2009 volume of the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, really has pretty much nothing at all whatsoever in the universe to do with students' ability to understand speech in the classroom and makes no s... See more I think there's a lot of Chinese whispers going on here, and it seems like the journalists involved haven't actually read the paper in question. The "new study", actually a paper called "Listening with an Accent: Speech Perception in a Second Language by Late Bilinguals" published in the October 2009 volume of the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, really has pretty much nothing at all whatsoever in the universe to do with students' ability to understand speech in the classroom and makes no statements on that matter. It is essentially interested in theories of phonological processing, not overall understanding of an utterance, or anything to do with classroom practice.
And despite that, the results *don't* actually suggest outright that it's easier for speakers to perceive speech in their "native" accent. To quote directly from the paper:
"However, there were no significant differences between familiarly accented and native-accented speech (...). Seemingly, this means that although native-accented speech is not easier for bilingual listeners than their own accent type, native-accented speech does not present any additional difficulties for perception (pp. 454-455)"
Also, the authors of the study point out that the results they observed could well be related to particular features of the languages in question. It is dangerous to just blindly extrapolate them to other languages (although in any case, the journalist in question appears to be extrapolating the wrong result to start with...).
Like with any study, there are also some limitations with the methodology. The authors associate difficulty of perception with how much stimulus from the *beginning* of the word is necessary to identify the word. But that will naturally bias languages/words in which there is regressive assimilation (basically, where a sound is influenced by the one following it-- e.g. in English when we say "ten girls", we actually tend to say "teng girls"), whereas when the whole utterance is heard, forms of progressive assimilation (when a sound is influcenced by the preceding sound, e.g. when French speakers say "chfal" instead of "cheval") may come into play more readily than this experiment allows. ▲ Collapse
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Accented teachers may be better for second language learners
I entirely agree! Thank God my most relevant teacher of English had a very nice Queen's English accent. My most relevant teacher of German had a Swiss accent, and some people say I speak German with a Swiss accent too, but that does not bother me much.
All in all, indeed an accented teacher is a lot better.... if they have one othe accents of the countries where the language is spoken. It it absurd to try to t... See more Accented teachers may be better for second language learners
I entirely agree! Thank God my most relevant teacher of English had a very nice Queen's English accent. My most relevant teacher of German had a Swiss accent, and some people say I speak German with a Swiss accent too, but that does not bother me much.
All in all, indeed an accented teacher is a lot better.... if they have one othe accents of the countries where the language is spoken. It it absurd to try to teach people a foreign language with a local accent. ▲ Collapse
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My kids who are mother tongue English speakers had to adopt a Ruritanian accent to be accepted by their teacher.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 10:37
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| Where's your accent from? | May 10, 2010 |
Nicole Schnell wrote:
Here I am today, an American citizen, and I yet have to encounter any stranger who will not start a conversation with "Where's your accent from?".
Just give them the name of some state on the opposite side of the continent.
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