Accents

A fun experiment for teachers to do with their students involves accents. An accent is a particular way of speaking that tells you a lot about the speaker (their geographic and social background). The experiment starts out with splitting into groups of three. Then, each person has to speak for 60-90 seconds about a topic of interest while the other two listeners make notes on the speaker’s pronunciation. Then, in order, the groups discuss their findings.

This can be extremely beneficial to both students and teachers, as they’ll be more aware of their accents and be able to better grade language and understand differences between accents and the range of variation. Though there are broad types of accents, each person has his or her own ways of pronouncing things. Being aware of such differences is crucial for teachers.

Source: Ozog, Chris “’I don’t have an accent!’ Said Alison from Sussex” Cambridge University Press, 4 April, 2017, P3