Should
an English teacher copy a native English accent to sound more professional?
English teacher’s main purpose is to help students to develop their skills to
communicate with others in a different language. Although many people believe
that having a native-like accent when talking English is the ultimate goal,
imitating an accent might lead to the following implications, the reinforcement
of stereotypes and discrimination towards non-native accents, and the
contribution to the idea of homogeneous language.
Firstly,
your workplace can be affected negatively by changing your accent to fit in due
to accentism. It is a term used to describe discriminatory or unfair behavior
centered on someone’s accent or language use (Kelly et al., n.d). As non-native
English speakers from Latin America, we are judged harshly because of our
accents. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office survey, “10 percent of
employers discriminate against candidates based on their accents”. (Hosoda et
al., 2010, p. 114) Hence, you will be treated differently than non-accented
applicants, and it will be harder for you to get a better job overseas. Also,
students might think that an accented teacher will not teach well even though
they have experience and their language teaching degree. It can be frustrating
because the only qualification needed to be a language teacher is being a
native speaker. Linguistic discrimination and intolerance towards non-native
accented employers will exist if you continue to imitate an American or British
accent.
Secondly,
it threatens the learning process and self-esteem of EFL students. By changing
your accent as a teacher to sound more professional, you will give the wrong
idea to your students that having a non-native accent is incorrect, and it
needs to be fixed. Hence, they will only appreciate foreign English accents but
not the local English ones. Also, there is the misconception that students
should reach a native-like accent to show their competence in the language. In
the classroom, students with a strong accent may suffer from bullying from
their peers who believe that a native accent is the most important thing to
achieve; so, learners will eventually give up on their learning process due to
their damaged confidence. For those reasons, the way teachers speak will
influence the learning process of their students because they will change their
non-native accents so that they are not bullied.
Finally,
it may contribute to the myth of linguistic homogeneity and thus the loss of
our identity. The concept of homogeneity or perfection leads to rejecting those
who speak with a different accent and forgetting the culture of those who do
not belong to the supremacy (Knooihuizen, 2015 p. 129). Currently, there are
378 million native speakers and 743 million non-native speakers in the world
(Eberhard, et all., 2021), yet we modify our accent to fit the standard, and we
disregard the idea of being proud of where we come from. Besides, almost
everything we enjoy comes from an English-speaking country, such as music,
entertainment, holidays, food, and we leave aside our cultural capital. Then,
if we suppress another part of our culture, in this case, our non-native
accent, we will allow them to continue colonizing us since we carry our
cultural background in it. Thus, we will no longer be us but an Americanized
person with a standard English accent.
On
the whole, one might think that the more we sound like natives, the better it
is for us as foreign learners; but the truth is that there are negative
consequences of imitating an accent. For instance, first, you can reinforce
accentism towards non-native teachers and affect job prospects since people
believe it is unprofessional. Second, your strong-accented students may be in
trouble and suffer from bullying in your classroom because it is harder for
them to change it. Finally, you will change who you are, your culture, and your
identity to fit into a standardized way of speaking English. As language
teachers, we cannot forget the importance of teaching the second language in a
context we all relate to. So why change our Colombian accent? Be proud and
share your culture in another language with your accent.
References
Eberhard, D., Simons, G., & Fennig,
C. (2021). Ethnologue: Languages of the World Twenty-fourth edition.
Ethnologue. https://www.ethnologue.com/
Hosoda, M., & Stone‐Romero, E.
(2010). The effects of foreign accents on employment‐related decisions. Journal
of Managerial Psychology, 25(2), 113–132. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683941011019339
Kelly, S., Childs, C., Watt, D., Turner,
H., & Hellmuth, S. (n.d.). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Accent,
Attitudes and Identity [MOOC]. Future Learn. Retrieved September 19, 2021,
from https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/accents-attitudes-and-identity-an-introduction-to-sociolinguistics/0/steps/64580
Knooihuizen, R. (2015). Language Myths
and the History of English. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 1(2),
271–275. https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2015-0015
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