No! You don't say it like that!

Hopefully no teacher would ever say such a thing. At least not in that way,

Thinking about accent, what model do we accept as being correct? There are many varieties of English being spoken around the world, but the two that have top billing are American-English and British-English. Nothing new there. But which accent do people believe to be the standard form for each of the mother-tongue countries? For a long time RP (Received Pronunciation) was the prestige standard of British-English, with GA (General American) for American-English. However, considering that around 10 years ago, only 3% of the UK population spoke using a pure RP accent (Crystal,1995: 365 cited in Jenkins, 2002: 8), what does this say about the state of English and what is standard? Perhaps similar results would be apparent for GA. Furthermore, most of the communication (74%) that goes on in English internationally is between/among Non-native speakers of English (Graddol, 2006).

Implications for pedagogy
It's easy for a teacher to think that is an absolute must to modify our students' pronunciation to fit our local model, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But we also need to think about the needs of our students. It may be that they have no desire to speak using our accent norms, but to retain their own accent in order to maintain their identity. What we do need to focus on is intelligibility and comprehendability. Provided that any utterance exhibits those two features, the the accent is not an important issue. Of course the oral needs of an international call centre operator are different to those of a dentist, which would require differing degrees of attention to accent (reduction).

Stress and intonation are perhaps more important than the production of other sounds, since this is where the shift between word classes and meaning take place.

Putting all of this together. There's no need to get upset if a student doesn't speak using your accent. Get to know what he/she wants to get out of learning English. If you can understand what they are saying and it is easy to understand, then what is there to change?

Please feel free to comment, we're all learning.

References
Graddol, D. (2006) English Next: Why Global English May Mean the End of 'English as a Froeign Language'. British Council, available at; http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-englishnext.htm last accessed [07.Feb.2010].

• pronunciation
• accent
• lfc
• local norms