Week 15

This week’s articles were very interesting to read, especially since this is an area I have always been fascinated with in regards to language acquisition. To begin, Lippie-Green’s findings in Chapter 2 of “Linguistics, Language, and Ideology” discussed present accents in an L1 and L2. The article explains how every native US speaker with English as their L1 has an accent resulting from a variation in language and is based off of geography or regions.  This makes me question though- what is an accent and how do we define it? Yes, the article says that it is “a specific way of speaking”, but how can we say: oh, this dialect is the standard way of speaking and the other ways are strange? An even more thought-provoking thought is how did these “accents” even come about? If we are all America and we all live in the same country and speak the same language, then how did geographic boundaries create such diverse dialects within the US? Where did they come from?!

I had never really realized this notion of every native speaker of English obtaining a specific accent until a studied abroad. Having classes with students from all over America opened my eyes to the different dialects and ways of saying certain words that are among us. I was constantly picked out for my “Chicagoan” accent, and I could definitely pick out some accents from other regions in my classroom (specifically the east and west coasts). My housemate in Spain was from Boston, so we always had a fun time making fun of each other’s choice of words and accents.

Another note mentioned in this article is that people who are learning a second language will have an accent along with their accent in their first language. Referring back to my study abroad experience, there were times of frustration when my host mom couldn’t understand what I was trying to say because my Spanish accent is very weak, so to read about how it is considered a “breakthrough” to achieve the correct accent in an L2 is exactly right. I always admired my friends who could speak Spanish with a perfect Spanish accent, and according to this article they were able to do so because of a breakthrough of native language phonology into the target language (43).

Chapter 5 in McKay and Bokhorst Heng’s book then discusses language intelligibility and that language EIL pedagogy should recognize the different variations of English and be aware of the validity of each one. I agree with this argument because I strongly believe in the importance of representing every language equally and providing enough awareness for our students of these diverse variations of language so that they are culturally conscious, open-minded and well-educated to prevent confusion.