UK to teach proper BBC English

[Tom Zurinskas]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/jemima-lewis/5067157/A-childs-speech-is-still-a-class-issue.html

A child's speech is still a class issue
Jemima Lewis
Last Updated: 5:44PM GMT 28 Mar 2009
Tucked away among the many controversial proposals in Sir Jim Rose's planned overhaul of primary school education is this strikingly retro idea: children should be taught to speak properly. If the new curriculum goes ahead, children aged 7 to 11 will learn to "adjust what they say according to the formality of the context", and to eschew such telling expressions as "I ain't".
It is a good idea, fraught with hazards. For starters, what counts as "proper" speech these days? Is it about grammar and vocabulary, or verbal dexterity, or – heaven forfend – accent? Is it, in fact, about class?
 It was once taken for granted that anyone ambitious with the misfortune to have a working-class or regional accent would take themselves off to the elocutionist to be cured. Joe Orton, Joan Bakewell and Beryl Bainbridge all converted to Received Pronunciation. As a rule of thumb, anyone over 60 who sounds like a purring aristocratic cad – think Leslie Phillips or Peter O'Toole – is certain to have grown up in a peat bog or an East End slum.
Today, in the age of authenticity, when the paramount virtue is to "be yourself", to change your accent is to disown your roots. We want to believe that the class system is dead: that we are above such snobbery. Life suggests otherwise.
"I can tell you are an educated person," taxi drivers often inform me. In fact, they can tell no such thing: my education has been erratic and, for the most part, lousy. My academic record is a tale of unstoppable underachievement. But I have what Sir Jim would call a "life skill": I sound cultivated.
It was not always so. As a teenager I developed a mockney glottal stop, to ingratiate myself with the undesirable element at the Whitton Youth Club. But I was cured by my mother, who got down on bended knee and begged me to stop dropping my aitches – her entreaties culminating in the portentous words: "You'll never get a job at the BBC if you talk like that."
I may have over-corrected. My voice is now far too posh for me ever to work at the BBC. I sound like Leslie Phillips doing an impersonation of the Queen. But at least I am sometimes mistaken for a person of refinement.
It's not just about accent, of course. What really matters is being able to order your thoughts and articulate them confidently, whatever your audience. We happen to associate these talents with the public school accent because it is public schools that tend to teach them best. In part this is by instruction and in part through social osmosis. When your friends' parents are playwrights, dons and barristers, you learn the art of clever conversation at the kitchen table.
Speaking properly is, too often, a class thing: an injustice that ought to be addressed in every classroom.




> Good job by Amy Walker speaking many accents if site reference works.
>
> http://my.englishclub.com/profiles/blogs/accents-1
>


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