A few
thoughts on accents and other things...
In Korea,
Korean teachers use an American English accent and vocabulary. However, I will
contest that in some cases, the British English variations, especially the
accent, makes more sense as some vowel sounds are more neutral. I would also
like to make very clear that I’m suggesting that a blend of both accents is
more beneficial when learning and/or using English, that is, take the best bits
from either, and disregard the rest. Indeed, in most cases, the accents overlap
anyway. Also, I am aware that there are other ‘varieties’ of accent, e.g.
Australian, South African etc., but as these countries are entirely
insignificant and have accents that sound like you’re gargling frogs, I won’t
bother with any of them. One last thing, there’s no such thing as a “British’
or ‘American’ accent of course – so here I’m talking about the typical
variations – the RP (BBC) English accent (Harry Potter’s or Kate Winslet’s, for
example), and the ‘standard’ American (e.g. President Obama). Also, I am
attempting to disregard patriotism here; trying to be objective. British
English is far from perfect. Indeed, in my own classes, I often use American
counterparts because they make more sense. Incidentally, though I’m using ‘colourful’
British spellings here, I only really bother with American ones in class.
OK, on with
the show. Which parts of the American accent or lexis should be replaced by British
counterparts, or vice versa? And why?
I’ll start with a couple that the Americans get right. Firstly, saying ‘zee’
for the letter ‘z’. Why do British people say ‘zed’? Many other letters rhyme
with ‘key’ - b, c, d, g, p, and t. Also, the alphabet song doesn’t work if you
say ‘zed’. We should really change this and use/teach the American variant in
Korea.
In British
English, the following sentence doesn’t make sense “I forgot my wallet at
home”. It should. We should use this, even back in the UK. It’s easy,
convenient, and useful.
Here’s one
I think the Americans get wrong, and in my opinion, is actually getting worse.
In the USA it’s quite common to misspell or misuse ‘than’ as ‘then’ because
they are expressed so similarly, yet these vowels are disparate sounds in
British English. We shouldn’t be teaching these as being so similar that they
become interchangeable and inseverable. In British English the word ‘can’, for
example, is pronounced very differently to ‘Ken’. In Korea, they have two
letters very similar to the British pronunciations of ‘a’ and ‘e’, that is “ah”
and “eh”, but I have actually heard Koreans pronounce ‘last’ as ‘rest’. Here
the disparity, and consequent ease of separation, favours using the British. In
New Zealand, it’s quite common for the ‘eh’ sound in words like ‘bench’ to
sound like ‘binch’. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, that is, we
should use as close to the standard, universal sounds as possible, and the ‘a’
in ‘can’ is pronounced globally as ‘ah’ in every language or accent. It is, if
you like, neutral.
It’s a
similar story with ‘o’ pronounced more like “ah”, and I’ve seen a poster here
spelling Bobby has “Bah-Bi” (in Korean). Again, I think we should not encourage
this, as the differences are too subtle, and foreign speakers of English will
just default to the (phonetically) nearest letter/phoneme. Here, we should
use/teach the neutral variations of ‘o’ and ‘a’, as they are closer to how
these letters are pronounced in all other languages using this alphabet (or any
alphabet where one grapheme/symbol equals one sound, like Korean, Russian or
Greek). Occasionally I modify my heavy Northern English accent to be more apprehensible
to Korean students, and I’m sure (and I hope I don’t come over as arrogant for
saying so) but I’m sure some of us could look at our accents and adapt them a
little for the classroom. One last point on this – I have not covered here the
British use of long ‘ah’ in words like ‘grass’/’grahss’. No British English teacher should be teaching this,
period. I mean full stop!
Not that
there’s anything wrong with the American variation, but word-final ‘r’ sound in
words like ‘butter’ or ‘older’ should be taught using the British variant. Word-initial
or -medial r-sounds like ‘ran’ or ‘orange’ are the same in either variety, but
the British English (perhaps wrongly) doesn’t really pronounce the word-final
‘r, ‘butter’ becoming ‘buttuh’’. However, as Asian students struggle with r/l
differentiation, anything to ease this difficulty is a bonus. There’s nothing
wrong with saying ‘but-uh’. It would be understood by anyone. This makes even
more sense when using word pairs like loyal/lawyer.
Spelling
Personally,
I tend not to bother with British spellings of things when teaching. I am not
on some personal crusade to promote Anglo Saxon heritage – the American will do
just fine thank you, though it’s worth pointing out that whilst the USA thinks
it’s so amazing for spelling ‘organize’ with a zed, I mean zee, because that’s
how it’s pronounced. Well, why not change wise to ‘wize’, eyes to eyez’, etc? Just
a small point! In sum, I don’t bother with British spellings in the classroom
unless to point out differences or if talking about the UK etc.
To
summarise then, I think American spelling is fine in the classroom, and really
the British is not worth pushing, certainly not because of some political
crusade anyway – it’s the students who are important in this situation, and
anything that makes their learning easier is a bonus. However, I feel the
American ‘o’ is too similar to a globally (Italian, Spanish, German etc.)
recognized ‘ah’ (grapheme ‘a’) sound in some words and we should if possible
use the common or garden ‘oh’ sound in words like ‘olive’, not ‘ah-live’. We
should also, as English teachers, in my opinion, not lean too heavily towards
‘eh’ for the letter ‘a’ (ah) in words like ‘bank’, as Korean students will
simply mistake this for ‘e’. A student saying ‘bank’ in the British or neutral
(ah) vernacular will not be misunderstood anywhere in the world including the
USA, a Korean student saying ‘rest’ for ‘last’ most certainly will.
I hope this
has come across as reasonably balanced. It’s not my intention and I’ve gone to
some pains to point out that this isn’t me being pro-British – in many cases it
makes more sense to use American English, or parts of it, in a Korean
classroom, but we must be careful. Language is about understanding and
communication, and anything that leads to a more central and universal
comprehensibility should, in my opinion, be adopted – an Esperanto of accents,
if you will.
