The Korea Times reports that non-native English speakers from countries including India, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines will be able to teach at public schools in Korea next year. The Korean government is opening the door for English teaching positions so that they can have more English teachers at primary and secondary schools. Non-native English speakers must hold a bachelor’s degree or above in English studies and teaching licenses from their countries.
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I just came across this incredible resource called Rachel’s English. The pronunciation content on this site is very rich because Rachel provides two short videos that describe and model each vowel and consonant sound in American English. This is a great resource for people who want to work on specific American English vowel and consonant sounds.
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Actors are often called to use an American accent in their roles on stage and film and this can be very difficult. Tanera Marshall, assistant professor of performing arts at the University of Illinois, has been a dialect coach for actors from a variety of countries. In this article she gives specific advice on how actors with British and Australian accents can learn to speak with an American accent.
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There is a great website you can use to read and hear the English pronunciation of names, places and things. The site offers not only phonetic spellings of words, but also audio samples so you can hear the proper English pronunciation.
The website is called inogolo.com and it was designed by Stuart Yoder, a software engineer in Austin, Texas.
I tried using the site this morning and I was very pleased with the quality of the English pronunciation of my name and the names of my family members.
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This transcript and audio from the Voice of America describes and compares two very important English language tests. One is the Test of English as a Foreign Language, known as the TOEFL. The other is the International English Language Testing System, or IELTS.
When you take the IELTS, the spoken English test is done as a live interview where you speak with an ESOL certified examiner.
The TOEFL Test of Spoken English costs $125.00.
The website for TOEFL is www.toefl.org.
The website for IELTS is www.ielts.org.
Read the VOA article and listen to the transcript.
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In this short opinion piece from the Topics Online Magazine, Alice Ortiz describes how English words have been incorporated into the Spanish spoken by Venezuelans. Other writers in this series also describe how English has influenced the languages of their countries in both negative and positive ways.
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Many Americans become frustrated when they call the customer support to solve a computer problem and are greeted with a voice with a foreign accent.
In response to these types of customer complaints the Dell company has initiated “Your Tech Team”, a service that guarantees customer service contact with agents in the United States. The ”Your Tech Team” service costs $12.95 a month for customers with a Dell account, or $99 a year for people who buy a new computer.
Without the upgrade customers will most likely get technical help from someone in India, the Philippines or the other places where Dell has operators.
Deepak Desai, chief executive of GlobalEnglish, a company that sells a program to improve the business-English skills of overseas workers, says ”There’s a large chunk of people who can communicate in English somewhat, but if you put them on a call interacting with an angry American — that’s hard”.
Read more about this story in the Washington Post.
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Everyone knows that there are many types of English spoken in the world; British, North American, Australian, Singaporean, Filipino, Indian, Jamaican, and many others. One of the big questions becomes how to ensure that everyone, everywhere, can continue to communicate well with each other despite our “English accents”.
This will be one of the topics at the Korea TESOL (KOTESOL) conference in October called “Responding to a Changing World”. From Oct. 25 to 26, over 1,000 English teachers from across Korea and Asia will gather at Sookmyung University to share ideas on how to improve the quality of English education in Korea and other Asian countries.
You can read more about this in the Korea Times.
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Immigrant professionals are taking classes at the University of Minnesota to improve their accents and communication skills. The director of the program says, ”We as Americans tend to make some judgments and assumptions about people’s credibility, their expertise and their education based on how we perceive them communicating,”
Participants understand that as adult learners they will never completely speak without an accent but they want to adopt ” a more American way of speaking” so that they can participate more fully in the workplace.
The classes are expensive though. Twelve hours of instruction cost $750.
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I like this IPA chart from esl-lounge.com because the 44 phoneme symbols are large and easy to read. However, there is no audio.
I think this site is more geared for ESL teachers than ESL students but you can explore the site to look for other activities.
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