linguist vs. english teacher
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 (10:20 PM)
my apologies that this new desktop has yet been installed with any photo editing software so the best i can make out of the screenshot i took was to crop. note the last ad right at the bottom. it says:
English Accent
English pronunciation software to help you reduce your accent today.
and that marks the difference between a linguist and an english teacher. what does it mean by "reduce your accent"? firstly, as we linguists know, accent is not the marker of competency. when we say someone is good in english (or any other language for that matter), do we judge it based on their accents? similarly, when we say someone is bad in english, do we judge it based on accent? no. we judge it based on grammatical correctness.
ironically, this ad either slaps itself or is trying to promote ethnocentrism. for one, by "reduc[ing] your accent", it simply means to create a "westernised accent". or in crude terms, an "ang moh accent", which is inaccurate in itself because even within britain itself, people have distinctively different accents. so, why should we have a more westernised or less asian accent? this is racist. because clearly, this is not targeted at the inner circle nations in kachru's model and it is propagating the notion that any other accent is inferior, or less severely, wrong.
but i believe this may possibly be unintended due to some socialization into some form of ideology. but being too entrenched in academics, i can't help but cda this ad. sorry.