Being approached by a parent who wants you to improve their child’s pronunciation is a fixture for English teachers all over the world. There somehow seems to be this desire to eliminate as many traces of the sound of the mother tongue as possible, misguided in many cases and only added pressure for both student and teacher.
To suggest that a strong foreign accent never leads to misunderstandings would be highly ambitious, leaving every language teacher responsible for getting their students to speak as comprehensibly as possible. This, incidentally, can be extremely difficult to achieve.
Some countries are known internationally for their accents when speaking English, whether endearing or difficult to follow, and it is often said that those (few) English people who learn other languages end up speaking them with a very heavy accent that can, at times, make them difficult to understand. Or is it just me?
Accents are rarely a bad thing. They are part of a person’s identity, and only need rectifying when their pronunciation makes communication difficult. The two are not even always the same. Pronunciation would be like the walls, doors, and layout of the office, while accent would be the atmosphere created by the staff who work there.
The idea that it’s a bad thing to speak a foreign language sounding like a person from your own country is bonkers, and so many more people would make faster progress through the levels if they accepted this and stopped wasting time and energy on trying to sound ‘more English’ and focused on fluency, vocabulary, and grammar instead.
Even if they never lose that slight accent, what of it? British people will love them all the more for it, and in any case, it is estimated that only 2% of Brits speak with a ‘standard accent’, known as received pronunciation anyway. We are immensely proud of the 60 or more native accents you can hear in the British Isles; we have no right to expect BBC-sounding foreign speakers. Check this video out, too.
Of course, there are some cases when people need to work on pronunciation, but in two decades teaching in Kazakhstan, I have never known this to be the case (with a local person). Instead, I have met and taught hundreds of people whose English pronunciation is so natural that they have sounded almost like native speakers, even from the lowest levels.
A confident and competent Kazakhstani speaking English, whether or not they lived in the UK (etc) does sound like a native speaker, in the overwhelming majority of cases, and even with the occasional stylistic error or slip in grammatical production, you are even left wondering if they were raised in a bilingual family, one of the two being English.
This reality applies to Kazakhstanis of any ethnic group.
Even an Intermediate English speaker from this country, complete with errors in even basic grammar forms and still experiencing those moments when they have to stop to remember words, speaks the target language with less of a foreign accent than, for example, a continental European may do even if they spent three decades in Oxford.
And the kids in the village where I live, who see me and get excited at being able to practise the few words they know, literally sound English when they do so.
According to this website, there are some languages whose structure of sounds can become a hindrance to producing English sounds correctly, and while I am not of a mind to pigeon-hole entire cultures here, international speakers of English will have encountered accents which they find more difficult than others.
Notably, Kazakh is not on the list, which suggests that the phonemes and diphthongs of the Kazakh language are no obstacle to ‘sounding English’ when speaking the world’s lingua franca, and while this is true to a greater extent, it doesn’t explain the aptitude Kazakhstanis have for clear-sounding words and sentences, to the envy of learners from many other countries.
The famous English TH sound, whether voiced or unvoiced, is the bane of many Europeans’ learning experience, and even Italians who have got to C2 level still sound like they are saying Zursday when setting up pre-weekend meetings with friends.
Let me remind you that this is a strength, not a weakness. It is only a problem when people misunderstand and turn up on the wrong day. The fact that they say the word a bit differently is beautiful.
People studying English across schools in Kazakhstan get that TH sound right from the start despite it not featuring in either of the two languages they grow up speaking. In contrast to native Russian speakers from north of the border, ethnic Russians here don’t have any discernible foreign accent, perhaps in part due to the exposure they have to Kazakh, but even that doesn’t explain their grasp of received pronunciation and the fact that they would be difficult to place by their accent by even an expert in linguistics.
Nobody knows how they do it, but they do it. Even in French, according to teachers of that language, too.
Kazakhstanis have excellent pronunciation skills. Maybe the best in the world!
Teachers in Almaty comparing notes with colleagues in other countries often point to the enormous difference in the time they spend teaching it. For the professional based here, it could be as low as zero (with occasional correction when a student attempts to pronounce a new word). In some countries, teaching pronunciation often takes up 25% of all course time.
This isn’t just in simple English, like hello, how are you? This reality extends right across the complexities of a language with bizarrely inconsistent spelling, with hundreds of words offering not a clue as to how you might say them.
I have ears, so I often hear the bears in the forest. How can anybody know by looking that ear and bear sound different? Yet I don’t remember in 20 years ever needing to stop a Kazakhstani person from saying beer when they mean bear.
So, when a Kazakh mother comes to me and instructs me to help their teenager improve their pronunciation, my response is often, simply:
“Why? She already sounds like a native speaker anyway?”
