accent reduction

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Personal experience on accent non-reduction.

As a Québécois bilingual who has learned English as a teen, I must say that
I find my accent to be enough of an asset that I made the decision not to
reduce it at all. I don't consciously exaggerate it but I make no attempt at
reducing it (apart from correcting my pronunciation of a few important
words).
It would be quite different if my native language had been Spanish or if I
were South Asian.

On 6/8/07, Susan Ervin-Tripp <ervintripp at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> Thanks to Kathryn Remlinger for sending the interesting Luongo article.
> At one point I was asked by someone in our China-born Chancellor's office
> whether he should take accent-reduction lessons. I advised against it. He
> was
> a very friendly man, beloved by students and faculty alike, and at
> that point raising
> money from west coast asians and asian-americans was an important
> part of his job.
> It could be argued that his accent was an advantage.  He had gotten his
> higher
> education in the U.S. and was a very able speaker, so accent was the
> only issue.
>
> When I was studying French bilinguals in Washington, D.C., who
> learned English as
> adults (mostly war brides from World War II) I met one who was known among
> the
> others as having an "enriched accent" in the sense that she
> exaggerated her accent.
> It seemed that way too. She worked for Air France and her acquaintances
> thought
> it was a professional advantage. These are two cases where accent is
> not a disadvantage.
>
> During that period of time, I was so eager to find bilinguals I would
> address them
> on the street and corral them for my research. I could tell French
> speakers from a distance
> because rounded vowels are more frequent in French than English, and lip
> rounding is visible.
>
> On methods of accent reduction, there is a method used by an English
> teacher from
> South American who spoke about her work here a few years ago. She has
> tapes of
> English speakers with varieties of English, asks students which they
> want to sound like,
> and teaches them how to do close phonetic transcription. In the
> process of learning to hear
> fine differences, they also learn to produce the sounds.
>
> Susan Ervin-Tripp
>



-- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
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