Pupil not picking up accent from native teacher

[sirgregory]

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!

Same experience. No native Spanish teachers. It's hard for me to even say how well they knew Spanish because they didn't really do any extemporaneous speaking in class. The homework and tests were all written. There were some call and response type exercises in class, but aside from that there was no real emphasis on speaking, pronunciation, or listening.

There were probably a few native teachers in the school system. They weren't necessarily better. I had one teacher who had an atrocious accent but she was organized and you would learn stuff like ser vs. estar, preterite vs. imperfect, verb conjugations.

[Gordafarin2]

Do American pupils pronounce Spanish poorly? (I imagine the teachers would be native, too)

Absolutely yes, and absolutely no My high school had three Spanish teachers and none of them were native. Two of them were married to native speakers and spoke Spanish at home, so they were all fluent enough; they didn't have perfect accents but I would add that the teachers' accents were not a key factor in the students' ability to pronounce well. A foreign accent is one thing, but fully mispronouncing vowels or letters like 'll' or 'ñ' is another.

With 30 teenagers all together in a mandatory class, there was not the time or the need to give detailed corrections when you have to push every student in the school through the same class for two years. I'll echo some of the other people in this thread that, other than some short presentations that might happen once or twice a semester, all of our graded work was written. And most of the students did not care enough to perform well on things they were not graded on.

50 minutes a week is so short - even in my suboptimal US public school classes, we were getting 5x that amount of teaching time. How big is her class? And, just as important, is she motivated to learn French? Does she have people she wants to talk to, or things she wants to do in French? There's no reason for her to put more effort in, if this isn't important for her.

Maybe outside of class the girl is practicing from her written notes, and reinforcing her own mistakes. Maybe she's listening to her classmates more than the teacher. It's hard to say without knowing more. But I wouldn't take it as a given that she will automatically pick up a beautiful accent from less than an hour a week of exposure. And if it's a big or rowdy class, there's going to be even less actual teaching time in that 50 minutes.

[Cavesa]

My answer is based on experience both with my own language classes around that age (with non natives) and those of my significantly younger siblings (with natives). The better results were the ones twenty years ago, with me. Yes, the class wtih non native teachers did better. Similar amount of time (3 hours a week. 50 minutes a week are nothing, that's an issue, but not a key one) Why? The methods and the attitude.

It is so stupid and harmful, that kids are much more babied nowadays. Neurologically, an 11 year old brain is much closer to an adult brain than a toddler brain. The kids at this age are already well past the deadline for acquiring a native language (or more native languages), they no longer have the same brain plasticity (even though they still have it much better than a 30 year old for sure), they store the new language to the same cortex areas as the adults. The limit age varies by authors, some say 3 years, some say 5, and so on. Nobody puts it in the teenage.

11 year olds are also in general not stupid. They are capable of some logical and abstract thinking, they are capable of understanding and applying patterns, they are capable of handling feedback and doing stuff differently. You know, music teachers don't have the same stupid attitudes like the language teachers, they do not give up on the kids' intelligence.

When it comes to pronunciation, an 11 year old has a much easier time than an adult, sure, but I am not sure it is realistic to expect so much near nativeness from them, they are not babies, they are not toddlers. It's hard for them too.

Btw I grew up in a cohort starting languages around that age. The results vary. Including the "accent". Some speak like natives. Some speak badly. What does it depend on? Everything we've done in the languages since. The best ones at 11 are often not the best ones now, and the worst ones even got among the best. Stop the pressure that stuff needs to happen very early or not at all, it doesn't work like that.

So, the problems that come from this misunderstanding (the confusing of anyone underage for a baby), that I've observed and which have really worsened in the last decades:

1.stupider coursebooks, hard to study from, hard to use for review at home with a family member, hard to use by the kid. No sense of progress (the kids notice, they are not dumb, they usually want results too). This may not affect the pronunciation much, but it does affect motivation and results. And the "we don't use it much anyway" doesn't help too.

2.very little pushing to actual speaking, with the excuse of the "silent period". The kids are often actually not too encouraged to speak much. If they don't speak, they cannot train the pronunciation.

3.Very little correction, with the belief that the kids will just soak it like a sponge, without extra effort by the kid or the teacher. The teacher may also fear that the kids would cry or not tolerate criticism. Again, babying near teens. Let's not forget that results are not the priority, keeping the parents happy enough to keep paying is the priority.

An 11 year old needs to understand, what they are learning. They need a lot of exposure. They need encouragement to speak. And they need a lot of correction. Kind, constructive correction, a lot of praise for success (there is nothing wrong with that, I am definitely not for pathologically strict teachers). But the corrections and encouragement to try again and again are extremely important.

What to do:

Tons of input are important. 50 minutes a week, that's nothing. It's more about the parents feeling good about it than anything else imho.

Encouragement to speak and try it. Without fear of mistakes. Corrections, guidance. Appreciation of progress. Really, do it like the music teachers.

And most importantly: Stop the unrealistic expectations. It is not easy for her, she is not a baby. She is most probably not underperforming, nor untalented, she is doing adequately for her age, for the amount of time spent on French, and the methods. Her results, skills, and even accent will depend much more on what she does and learns in the years to come. For that, her relationship to French and language learning is much more important. It needs to be supported and cultivated. She should experience success and progress, that is a huge motivator too.

[smallwhite]

Thank you for everyone's input.

I understand individual points, but I still don't get why the difference between her good English accent and wrong French pronunciation (same class setting, same tendency to mimick peer accent, same written homework > speaking opportunity...) (And the English teachers are likely to be non-native). But I don't have further details so it's okay. I remember now that peer influence is strong.

And now I'm thinking - if she's just going to mimick peer accent anyway, does that mean it won't help even if I stepped in some way?

[Le Baron]

Thank you for everyone's input.

I understand individual points, but I still don't get why the difference between her good English accent and wrong French pronunciation (same class setting, same tendency to mimick peer accent, same written homework > speaking opportunity...)

I would have thought that would be the relatively easy bit. English is everywhere, particularly in Hong Kong, right? And French isn't. How much French is spoken in the streets around her, comes on TV, is necessary to navigate certain websites, is the language of a particular book, is she likely to run into as a communication medium? That reinforces pronunciation quality.

Someone above already said that mimicking peers is no key to a great accent because in a class of people not from that language background or largely unfamiliar with it, one just mimics other people's possible mistakes and they mimic yours!

Maybe the teacher is just no good.

[Cavesa]

Thank you for everyone's input.

I understand individual points, but I still don't get why the difference between her good English accent and wrong French pronunciation (same class setting, same tendency to mimick peer accent, same written homework > speaking opportunity...) (And the English teachers are likely to be non-native). But I don't have further details so it's okay. I remember now that peer influence is strong.

And now I'm thinking - if she's just going to mimick peer accent anyway, does that mean it won't help even if I stepped in some way?

Are you sure the conditions are really the same? Have the parents visited each class and really seen the same amount of speaking encouragement and corrections? I somehow really doubt that, otherwise the results would have to be similar.

Perhaps the English teachers are simply more active, more hard working with the kids, and pay more attention to it. That's more than being a native. Perhaps the English teachers really push the kids to results, while the French ones are lazy and create a self fulfilling prophecy "French is too hard anyways". It happens sometimes.

The peer mimicking could be one of the causes of the difference. If a part of her English class are natives (or English is one of their native languages), and the French class has only normal beginner students with bad pronunciation, it is indeed likely to be different. Such things happen. But in general, she cannot learn from her peers, what the peers don't know. And the teachers are paid to teach, they should know how to deal with that.

[smallwhite]

I mean, eg. I learned my L2s in very different settings (in-country, weekly 40-minute classes, self-taught) but my accents are equally good (or bad) in all of them, say, all around 80% score, rather than 90% in English but 30% and incomprehensible in French. We're talking about English vs French, not English vs Thai.

Do your accents vary so greatly between your closely-related L2s just because the learning environments are different?

And so giving her audio clips or HP audiobooks is not going to help because peer accent overrides all?

[Cavesa]

I mean, eg. I learned my L2s in very different settings (in-country, weekly 40-minute classes, self-taught) but my accents are equally good (or bad) in all of them, say, all around 80% score, rather than 90% in English but 30% and incomprehensible in French. We're talking about English vs French, not English vs Thai.

Do your accents vary so greatly between your closely-related L2s just because the learning environments are different?

And so giving her audio clips or HP audiobooks is not going to help because peer accent overrides all?

Of course they vary because of the different learning environments, she hasn't tried to compensate for the differences, I assume (for example like you surely compensated for lack of natives during your self teaching by lots of audio recordings). That's the most probable cause. I have yet to meet a person, who is clearly so differently talented at different languages, that the same conditions would lead to vastly different results.

I really think the most probably cause of bad French results is a bad quality of the class and teachers, that's it. If she doesn't particularly struggle with English, there is no other reason, why she should be bad at French.

Just "giving her" something won't really do anything at all imho. Does she want to learn? Will she be happy to engage with the content? Just throwing it on her, boring her, or doing it as "background noise" is worthless and may just damage her relationship to French an language learning. Also, let's not forget she is a beginner. She will not understand HP or some random audio clips, so it might happen to have a totally opposite and demotivating effect. Really, she is not a baby, to just lie down and passively soak up the sounds. Or to be forced to be exposed to something. She is a pre-teen.

The peer accent won't override it all, if the teachers do their jobs, encourage her to speak, and correct her.

[白田龍]

Trying to teach a child a language with just 50min weekly seems like she's just wasting her time there is no way she will get any good at French even after years of this.

[tiia]

From my experience a lot depends on the teacher. A person can distinguish between a person having a bad accent and one with a good one relatively soon. However, they may not be able to mimick it immediately.
To me the situation sounds more like there's no or not enough explicit teaching of the pronounciation. If there are rules, that letters are silent, but the student is pronouncing them anyway, something went more fundamentally wrong. It's even clearer, if all the students in the class make the same kind of mistakes.

If pronounciation is not explained correctly (and no corrections are made) the student may be extremely unsure about the whole thing and they will try to do something. And in this case, I assume, it would first appear more logical to pronounce everything that's written.