Questões Militares Sobre aspectos linguísticos | linguistic aspects em inglês

The regional accentism that secretly affects life prospects

        At age 22, Gav Murphy was living outside his home country Wales for the first time, working in his first job in media production in London. His South Wales Valleys accent was very thick, he recalls. He’d say ‘tha’ rather than ‘that’, for instance. He was perfectly understandable; yet a senior colleague overseeing his work insisted Murphy change his accent so all the broadcasters sounded uniform on air. The effects of adaptation were far-reaching. “It sort of broke my brain a little bit,” says Murphy. “I thought about literally every single thing I was saying, literally every time I was saying it. Moving to standard English was just laborious.”

        Foreign-accent discrimination is rampant in professional settings. But discrimination can also extend to certain native speakers of a language, because of the judgements attached to particular accents. While many employers are becoming very sensitive to other types of bias, accent bias remains challenging to root out. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

       While the cognitive shortcuts that contribute to accent bias may be universal, the degree of accent awareness and prejudice varies greatly. For instance, “The UK has a very, very fine-tuned system of accent prestige,” says Devyani Sharma, a sociolinguist at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s a combination of a very monolingual past, where English developed as a symbol of the nation, and the very acute social class hierarchy historically.” She adds that overt accent bias in the US is based more on race, whereas in the UK, it’s more tied to class.

        In some cases, accent bias is directly related to government policy. Since the 1860s, the Japanese government has modernised the country with a focus on Tokyo, says Shigeko Kumagai, a linguist at Shizuoka University, Japan. “Thus, standard Japanese was established based on the speech of educated Tokyoites.” In contrast, the Tohoku dialect spoken in northern Japan became “the most stigmatised dialect in Japan”, says Kumagai. Its image is “rural, rustic, old, stubborn, narrow-minded, backward, poor, uneducated, etc”. Young women from Tohoku are often given discriminatory treatment that makes them feel ashamed of their accents.

        A pesquisa de Kumagai mostra que a forte estereotipagem do dialeto Tohoku é perpetuada pela concentração da indústria de mídia na capital japonesa. De fato, em todo o mundo, a mídia tem um impacto enorme na percepção dos sotaques. Portanto, entendemos por que a preponderância de emissoras do Reino Unido em Londres provavelmente contribuiu para a marginalização do sotaque galês de MurphyKumagai’s research shows that the strong stereotyping of the Tohoku dialect is perpetuated by the concentration of the media industry in the Japanese capital. Indeed, the world over, the media has an enormous impact on perceptions of accents. So we understand why the preponderance of UK broadcasters in London likely contributed to the marginalisation of Murphy’s Welsh accent.

(Christine Ro. www.bbc.com, 08.05.2022. Adaptado)

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Because we all have different styles of teaching, and therefore planning, orientations about course planning and delivery should not be meant to be prescriptive. As Bailey (1996) points out, a lesson plan is like a road map “which describes where the teacher hopes to go in a lesson, presumably taking the students along”. It is the latter part of this quote that is important for teachers to remember, because they may need to make “in-flight” changes in response to the actuality of the classroom. As Bailey (1996) correctly points out, “In realizing lesson plans, part of a skilled teacher’s logic in use involves managing such departures to maximimize teaching and learning opportunities”. Clearly thought-out lesson plans will more likely maintain the attention of students and increase the likelihood that they will be interested.

(RICHARDS, Jack C.; RENANDYA, Willy A.(Ed.). Methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. p. 36. Adaptado) 

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                      Teaching English in the Brazilian countryside

      “In Brazil, countryside youth want to learn about new places, new cultures and people. However, they think their everyday lives are an obstacle to that, because they imagine that country life has nothing to do with other parts of the world”, says Rafael Fonseca. Rafael teaches English in a language school in a cooperative coffee cultivation in Paraguaçu. His learners are the children of rural workers.

      Rafael tells us that the objective of the project being developed in the cooperative is to give the young people more opportunities of growth in the countryside, and that includes the ability to communicate with international buyers. “In the future, our project may help overcome the lack of succession in countryside activities because, nowadays, rural workers’ children become lawyers, engineers, teachers, and sometimes even doctors, but those children very rarely want to have a profession related to rural work”, says Rafael.

      “That happens”, he adds, “because their parents understand that life in the countryside can be hard work and they do not want to see their children running the same type of life that they have. Their children also believe that life in the country does not allow them to have contact with other parts of the world, meet other people and improve cultural bounds. The program intends to show them that by means of a second language they can travel, communicate with new people and learn about new cultures as a means of promoting and selling what they produce in the country, and that includes receiving visitors in their workplace from abroad.”

      Rafael’s strategy is to contextualize the English language and keep learners up-to-date with what happens in the global market. “Integrating relevant topics about countryside living can be transformative in the classroom. The local regional and cultural aspects are a great source of inspiration and learning not only for the young, but for us all.”

Adapted from http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2019/01/21/teaching-english-in-the-brazilian-classroom/