[etni] Fwd: Re: Standard English
- From: ETNI list <etni.list@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Etni <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:51:13 +0200
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marlene <marlenegay@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Standard English
From personal experience, it is not ok to have an "appalling Anglo
accent" in Hebrew if you want to teach Ulpan in Israel, despite having
excellent pedagogical skills and linguistic knowledge. Ditto for quite
a number of acting positions in Hebrew.
BTW, my choir teacher has been improving my friends' Israeli
pronunciation, especially th. She claims it's a matter of
concentration, paying attention and will power. So my singing
pronunciation is quite good, but speaking gives me away right away as
an Anglo - after 40 years in the country.
Marlene
Doron wrote:
> To add my 2 grush:
> Vee argh Izraeliz, end vee dont hev to spik (or teach) BBC, or any other
> kind of English *accent*. Now *pronunciation* is a different matter - of
> course our students need to know, sound and hear the difference between
> "bad" and "bed", "cat" and "cut", etc. But let's not take our biases to the
> absurd: as Barry notes, each one of us feels that his or her *accent* is the
> correct one - yanks, brits, aussies and sith ifricans - and secretly look
> down on everyone who doesn't sound like us. But we have no right,
> pedagogically speaking, to force our students to speak like us. If your
> students (or their parents) want to sound like Americans, let them listen
> to, mouth and mimic Britney Spears. We have enough to do in the classroom
> without this.
> On a different level, this whole discussion is disrespectful to the many
> excellent English teachers whose mother tongue is not English: are they less
> good teachers because they have other accents? Why is okay to speak Hebrew
> with an appalling anglo-accent, but not okay to speak english with a
> russian, hebrew, or arabic one? The world has moved on since BSE - British
> Standard English - was the only standard, and not only at the BBC.
>
> As my esteemed lecturer, Prof. Yael Ziv of the English Department at Hebrew
> U., once said: listen to what I say, not to how I say it. Would that we
> could all follow her advice.
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