The importance of a near-native accent. This talk will discuss whether or not it is important for EFL-teachers to try and achieve a near-native generally accepted accent for their students. The focus will be on the credibility of non-native speakers of English while speaking English in a globalising world, with a heavy or mild foreign accent. These days and in the future more and more non-native speakers of English will communicate with each other in English. For a native speaker it is not that difficult to understand a non-native speaker speaking English with a lot of local or regional phonological interferences. For two non-native speakers of different origin, both speaking English with a mild or heavy accent, it might be more likely that confusion about what is being said occurs because of the foreign accent. Research (Shiri Lev-Ari &, Boaz Keysar, Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility, 2010) proves that a near-native accent adds to the credibility of the speaker. In the Netherland most EFL-teachers were trained to speak English with an RP or GA accent. As soon as they start teaching students in secondary education they accept “World English” and most teachers do not pay a lot of attention to pronunciation mistakes made by their students, as long as they can get the message across. During the talk the audience will be asked how important they consider a near-native accent is, what mistakes they accept and don’t accept and in which way teaching pronunciation is an issue in their lessons. Some sound samples with typical mistakes the Dutch make while speaking English will be presented and discussed to see if the audience consider them to be confusing or not. Then a strategy, using phonetics as a tool, will be presented to help correcting a few typical mistakes. session type : talk (30 minutes) Audience; EFL teachers & teacher trainers
MULTIFILE
In CLIL contexts in the Netherlands, learners use the target language meaningfully in subject lessons parallel to English classes and English teachers are expected to co-operate with subject teacher colleagues. What does this mean for content and language in English lessons and for English teachers’ pedagogical and collaborative practices? For example, it has been suggested that Teachers of English in Bilingual streams (TEBs) may need to use different language teaching methodologies to mainstream English teachers. Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010) suggest “the language needed in CLIL settings does not necessarily follow the same grammatical progression one would find in a language-learning setting.”(Coyle et al, 2010: 35) and that this has consequences for language teachers’ approaches to planning for CLIL learners; “It is not built on a grammatical model where progression focuses on a gradation of grammatical concepts, but incorporates grammatical progression from different perspectives.” (2010: 59)To explore the challenges facing TEBs, Dale, Oostdam and Verspoor (2017) reviewed the literature on language teachers in various forms of bilingual education. They found the literature referred to a wide variety and range of types and aspects of language, types of content, theories informing LTs’ pedagogical practices and issues for LTs’ collaborative practices. Even though there were no one-fits-all approaches to be found, a framework of possible choices to be made emerged. The framework presents a landscape for TEBs in four quadrants, based on the literature.This presentation will discuss this framework in the light of a subsequent qualitative study exploring idealisations of TEBs’ pedagogical and collaborative practices in the Netherlands. Focus group discussions were held with stakeholders in bilingual streams. These included members of quality assurance panels responsible for certification of bilingual schools, practising TEBs and subject teachers. On the basis of inductive and deductive analysis of the focus group transcripts, we will discuss the extent to which stakeholders’ ideals for TEBs reflect the literature. Coyle, D., Hood, P., & Marsh, D. (2010). Content and language integrated learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Dale,L. Oostdam, R., & Verspoor, L. (2017, submitted) Searching for Identity and Focus: Towards an analytical framework for language teachers in bilingual education Manuscript in preparation
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