"IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK WITHOUT AN ACCENT..."

TELL ME HOW YOU SPEAK AND I WILL TELL YOU WHERE ARE YOU FROM

By Ileana Ayala Mendez

Where are you from? Let me hear how you speak!

If we pay attention to the different places where English language is spoken as a first language, we will realize the regional accents of English speakers are very different and vary depending on the different areas where the language is spoken.  And what happen with non-native English speakers? They mainly tend to carry over the intonation from their mother language (tongue) into English speech, so you can tell if the people talking with you come from France, Canada, India, Japan…  But not only this, you can also get more information about people’s background by listening them talking such as: their education level, their social status, their friend’s social status as well, etc. 

 

We, as teachers, have the opportunity and the challenge to expose our students to different English accents in order to improve their language comprehension. They deserve to learn as “real English” as it can gets when they are out from the classroom. We need to help our students to successfully interact in any English native society.
  

What I did while I was teaching 5^th and 6^th grade was to host invited speakers to the classroom (any English native speaker) and give the students the opportunity to talk with the invited person about different topics of interest. It was a great experience to see the students talk and interact naturally with the invited speaker! After the activity students told they where surprised being able to understand all the conversation and their confidence speaking English was up-grated!

Remember: “It’s impossible to speak without an accent and that there is not such thing as unaccented English”.