Pupil not picking up accent from native teacher

[smallwhite]

Friend's daughter ~11yo has been having weekly 50-minute French classes from a native speaker, among typical school subjects in a typical local school in Hong Kong. Her English and English accent have always been good, so I thought her French would be the same. But instead, she pronounces French almost like it was English, eg. with all the -s -z in verb endings. They have a typical A1 textbook for teen classes where there are 500 different things on a page scattered everywhere unaligned and in 600 different colours, but girl said they don't use the book much. So class should be even more speaking/listening-heavy? Why the poor pronunciation? Do American pupils pronounce Spanish poorly? (I imagine the teachers would be native, too). Girl learnt Mandarin, too, and is likely still having weekly classes at school.

[FeoGringo]

I can only speak for my own experience with languages in the United States school system but most of the teachers in my high school were not native speakers of the language they taught and therefore were not accurate models of pronunciation. Also pronunciation was glossed over if it was reviewed at all. Other people's experiences may vary!

[Le Baron]

Her English and English accent have always been good, so I thought her French would be the same.

Why? The English will surely have had more and varied input than classes at school. The French is one teacher at school and a lot of other students learning a language which is not even half as present in the environment.

[smallwhite]

Her English and English accent have always been good, so I thought her French would be the same.

Why? The English will surely have had more and varied input than classes at school. The French is one teacher at school and a lot of other students learning a language which is not even half as present in the environment.

Because it'd mean she has the ability (or whatever) to pick up accents.

The "other students" part would be the same in both cases.

As to varied input, I think instead it's easier to pick up an accent if the input is constant rather than varied.

Eg. I say "basikly" (3 syllables) even thought it's spelt "basically" (4 syllables) because "basikly" is all I've ever heard. Why is she saying the equivalent of "ba.sic.cal.ly" when her only French input is a native speaker?

[Deinonysus]

In my experience it is the norm for students in a classroom to make no progress in achieving a good accent in a foreign language. I can't say for sure if this would be different if the teacher is a native speaker because I have never taken a language class that was taught by a native speaker, but I don't know if it would make a huge difference.

I would wager a guess that her progress in English is not the default result for a random person learning a random foreign language but due to Hong Kong's history and culture of English use. Her experience with French is probably a more standard experience for a typical foreign language learner in a classroom setting.

[Kraut]

some reasons
- aged eleven, she is not a teen but a child
- when I was 11 I was learning Latin and did not understand what was going on
- am I right, she has a single French class of 50 minutes in a week?
- this seems to be her first real foreign language
- French is very difficult to learn: unpronounced letters, liaisons, voiced sounds and above all "chaine parlee" (the last syllable in an utterance gets the stress)

[Cainntear]

Her English and English accent have always been good, so I thought her French would be the same.

Why? The English will surely have had more and varied input than classes at school. The French is one teacher at school and a lot of other students learning a language which is not even half as present in the environment.

Because it'd mean she has the ability (or whatever) to pick up accents.

The "other students" part would be the same in both cases.

Yes, but as Le Baron says, in English, the teacher and classmates are not the sum total of the exposure to the language, whereas in the case of French, they are.

As to varied input, I think instead it's easier to pick up an accent if the input is constant rather than varied.

Except that language is social, and kids tend to the norm. In a school class, the norm is peers, not the teacher, because the teacher is one person. A child of America parents with an American teacher in an Australian town is going to pick up the Australian accent from their peers. You may say that that's a different situation as they're just different accents and both are native, but the brain doesn't have an automatic filter that tells the difference between native and non-native.
One of my neighbours did some voluntary French teaching at the primary school because her daughter was starting to speak English to her at home. She stopped suddenly after it became apparent that her native-speaking daughter was starting to pick up a learner accent.

Exposure to multiple sources of language establishes a broader external norm, and reinforces that it isn't the teacher who's the odd one out.

[Le Baron]

Except that language is social, and kids tend to the norm. In a school class, the norm is peers, not the teacher, because the teacher is one person.

Yes, that's the key.

[golyplot]

I can only speak for my own experience with languages in the United States school system but most of the teachers in my high school were not native speakers of the language they taught and therefore were not accurate models of pronunciation. Also pronunciation was glossed over if it was reviewed at all. Other people's experiences may vary!

That's odd. In my own US high school (and middle school), all the foreign language teachers were native speakers.

[Pikaia]

I bet English phonetics are interfering, exacerbated by the fact that French learners are typically graded on written output (spelling!) more often than they are graded on speaking. In the US, a student who speaks well but cannot spell properly will end up with a lower grade than a student who spells everything perfectly but speaks incomprehensibly. Liaisons and elisions add to the French learner’s challenges.

And I completely agree with previous comments regarding the negative influence of other novices. As a beginner, listening to peers is the worst. In my older daughter’s online Spanish 1-3 classes, the teacher required students to keep their mics off most of the time. He wanted then to hear him modeling proper pronunciation more often than they heard each other mangling it. Over time, she and her classmates developed pretty good accents, but obviously this approach won’t work in an in-person classroom.