South African Pronunciation!!

[Gunpo_Erin]

Canadian accents are lazy and loud, huh?  That is a big generalisation! 
 
All countries have different accents= some being easier to understand.  This goes for your country as well! 
 
 
 

Surprisingly, after 8 months at my school, my co teachers informed me they we’re really satisfied with having a British speaker in the school, after years of Canadians.  They said British English was so much clearer and easier to understand compared to the lazy loud Canadian accent from the previous 2 teacher’s

I guess it just comes down to exposure.

[lindsaydp1]

I think the Saffa accent is a bit easier to understand sometimes (as mentioned by many people on here, as well as my Korean CT's) because we don't say the R in words like Mart, custard, card, etc. If you see those words written in Hangul, as they are all over the place, it's E Mah-Tuh (이마트), Kah-duh (카드), etc. The R is not emphasised, so the way we say it is they way Koreans write it phonetically in Hangul. Does that make sense?

Anyway, I don't change my accent for the kids, and they've learned to understand me. My friend from Glasgow was the NET before me here, so they got used to understanding tricky accents! Mine is a walk in the park compared to his!

[Paul]

Yeah, I don't change my accent at all (weak Australian accent; same broad Commonwealth dialect as SA) during regular classes. Exposure to a broad range of accents is great, and the benefits are listed above over and over.

However, there is one exception here: just prior to the end of semester the MOE/POE issues standardised listening tests, especially at primary school level I'll fake it. Please, please go through and revise the TL with your students using either a set of American accented recordings or by faking one yourself on the relevant handful of words. You don't need to discuss the differences on a phonetic level or anything (and please refuse to answer the inevitable question of "which is better?" for the sake of the next guy) but just state there are two ways of saying this word (American and Commonwealth) so it is important they know both for the test, hint, hint.

If your MOE is anything like mine (Daejeon) they will find the absolute strongest, fastest American city accent they can find for the test, and churn out questions pivoting on the words "water", "tomato" and "class" again and again. Sometimes I feel there's actually a disproportionate amount of dialect specific questions on the tests compared to the curriculum and it... well... I almost start to feel like... nevermind. My personal paranoia aside, don't risk your kids failing because of your accent. Yes, it's only a handful of words at most (rhotic Rs, lazy flapped Ds and the old soft A before S rule) but these can pop up enough to ravage test scores if your students are not prepared.