If my Intro to English Prof in college is to be believed, my hometown of Denver is one of the few regions in the US with no noticeable accent or dialect. In the following decades I’ve lived in several places including Texas with one southern drawl and Tennessee with a different southern drawl.
I remember one particular instance of frustration when someone I was talking to in Texas was saying the word “pop.” That just didn’t make sense in the context of the discussion, so I asked several times to clarify what he was talking about. “Pop? What are you talking about?” Finally, with obvious mockery, he slowly enunciated the word “pipe.” Oh…now I get it!
So I’ve wondered for a long time, in regions where they speak with heavy drawls (or any accent for that matter), how do teachers who speak with that kind of dialect teach phonics? When teaching the alphabet, do they say “…f, g, h, AH, j, k…”? Do they teach that “oil” is pronounced “oyl” or do they say “ole”? As they read aloud from the classic Green Eggs and Ham do they say, “AH do not LOCK them, Sam-I-Am”?
English is confusing enough as it is. I wonder how they approach phonics in regions with such noticeable accents.
They speak as normal, and are understood as such by their students. After all, accents are really just the ways someone speaks differently than you do. What an outsider hears and what someone with the same accent hears isn’t the same thing.
I don’t know about phonics, but one of my best friends is a speech therapist. I remember talking to her about it one time, and she told me that you don’t mess with dialect when fixing speech problems (as hard as it is sometimes to work with kids who are “axing” questions, for example).
The mapping between the letters of the alphabet and English pronunciation is arbitrary enough for standard English; regional pronunciations of course usually won’t help make the mapping any more logical, but in many cases, I don’t think they will make it any less logical, either. Why, for example, do you think that pronouncing the letter “I” as “AH” would make it any harder to learn phonics? If in some regions “pipe” and “like” get pronounced as what in standard English spelling would be represented as “pop” and “lock” respectively, then the mapping from spelling to pronunciation is different, but it’s no more or less consistent than it is for standard English.
(One kind of situation in which regional pronunciations can make it harder to spell is when certain phonemes are deleted under some conditions. For example, if your dialect pronounces “lost” as “loss”, then of course you’ll be at a loss at first for knowing when to write “loss” and when to write “lost”.)
Your English professor was very, very wrong about Denverites not having an accent. Everybody has an accent. Just because you talk with the same accent as people on tv doesn’t make it a non-accent.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation used in linguistics applies equally, regardless of what dialect, language, or accent you have.
Well, if you are using it phonetically. If you are using it phonemically, then it doesn’t change since most speakers of the language recognize the dialectical differences as being the same word.
And that is how phonics are taught. You teach phonemically, not phonetically. For the vast majority of words, this still works. Sure, you and I may say /i/ differently, but we still generally are consistent with it.
And the exceptions you just learn are exceptions. Like, in my dialect, pin and pen are pronounced the same, but, of course, any phonics teacher would stress the differences. The result is that some kids think that the teacher just says “pen” weirdly, and the others think it’s correct and say it the other way. Eventually, it becomes part of their code switching. Which dialect is considered normal depends on the person.
In other words, I still say pen the way most midwesterners do, except when I’m talking with fairly backwoods people, to which I natively say peeyun–the same way I would say pin. The former is why I’m usually assumed to have a Southern Missouri accent, not a northern Arkansan one.
I once knew someone who was a teacher on Long Island. She had a somewhat Midwesternized accent, but many of her coworkers had strong LI accents. She was preparing a lesson one day about rhyming words, and was writing pairs of words on a poster: cat/hat, mouse/house, dog/log, and so on. Another teacher looked at the poster and said, confused, “Doawg and laahg?! Those don’t rhyme!”
So yes, how phonics is taught will naturally vary depending on the local accent, and in some cases, depending on the individual teacher. But most of the time, it’s not confusing to the students, because to them, their accent isn’t “noticeable” at all; it’s just the way normal people talk.
I had a teacher in junior high that insisted that the proper pronunciation of pecan was pee’-can, instead of pi-kahn’. :dubious:
Told her there was no way in hell that I was going to pronounce it the way she did. :mad:
Got an F on that particular day.
When I explained to my Mom and Dad why I got the F, they both laughed and said not to worry about it, seeing’s how everybody in the family pronounced it the way I insisted to her was right.
Grad student training to be a speech therapist here.
From what I’ve learned, you become flexible to what the predominant accent of the area is. It’d be silly to try to teach the overwhelming population your own accent, especially if you have a noticeably different accent. The ideal goal of therapy is to have the person talk fluently as their peers with as little of noticeable difference as possible.
As mentioned above, this includes working with different dialects. I’ve known therapists, and I’m sure I’ll do this in the future as well, who have asked parents of AAE speakers if they want their child to learn MAE words such as “asking” or “teeth” if they wanted the AAE of “axing”, “teef”, etc.
We are selling our ability to teach others to speak. If I wasn’t flexible and was only willing to teach them the way I speak, I doubt I would be in business for very long.
Bit of a hijack but, following on from the (enlightening) speech therapists’ replies, has there ever been or is there any tradition of elocution lessons in the USA? That’s elocution in the sense of learning a standard or posh way to speak.
Kinda-sorta. Again, this is coming from a newbie. Last summer one of my teachers had a therapist come in to talk about her current job of training nurses at a hospital to “speak better.” This included extinguishing accents and learning the local dialect…For example, one nurse was taught to say “comfterble” instead of “comfortable” as enunciating the entire word is uncommon and many patients were confused when she asked “Are you comfortable?”. Little things like that. The teacher even showed us a standardized test, so it seems that the field is at least common enough for there to be tests established.
I’ve had other teachers talk here and there about their experiences, mostly people from foreign countries coming in and getting lessons to sound more “American,” either paid by themselves or by the companies they work for. Some therapists are very interested in this area and some wouldn’t touch it with a nine-foot pole.
I grew up in southern Virginia and never heard of phonics until I was in college. I thought someone had finally come up with a standard for pronouncing letter groups. What a great idea! Now I know that all those years mom and my teachers yelled at me to “sound it out”, they thought I had already learned this stuff.
My Mom asked this exact question of my aunt, who grew up in the Pacific NW but moved to Alabama before having kids. She said “Oh, it’s easy. They start with the vowels: ah, eee, ah, aew, yew!” So yes, your guess is correct. As far as they’re concerned, they don’t have an accent that gets in the way. They’re pronouncing it correctly, and teaching the kids to do the same.
Dictionary perfect pronunciation is pretty rare IMHO (at least, it is in my every day experiences).
I specifically remember one of my teachers in 9th grade, Mrs. Stevens, who had the habit of saying the letter R with a pronounced ‘uh’ sound at the end of it, so that it sounded like are-ruh.
This was an English/Grammar teacher for Og’s sake. :eek:
Another thing I’ve noticed in the intervening years is that, that weird pronunciation of the letter R is fairly common among blacks/African Americans* here in the South, (specifically Texas and Louisiana) and I’ve often wondered if it was more widespread than I’m aware of.
:nitpick:
A “nine-foot pole”? Is this a common saying in your ‘neck of the woods’?
I’ve always heard it said, “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole”.
*Take your pick of which ever term suits you. Personally, I use black. I mean, it would sound pretty strange to call white people “European American”, wouldn’t it?
> . . . my hometown of Denver is one of the few regions in the US with no
> noticeable accent or dialect . . .
This isn’t true, since every place has an accent, and it’s not even true that the accent of the Denver area is closest to what is usually thought of as “American news broadcaster English.” That’s usually identified as further east than Denver:
