THE AUDIO ARCHIVE

Exposing our students to different accents is very important. In a globalized world we have to speak English with people who have many different accents. There are many different kinds of native accents, such as American, British, Australian and many more. But there are non-native speakers who speak English with a Japanese, French, or German accent, just to mention a few examples. And we have to be able to understand everything.

When you speak, you don’t have to change your accent according to the place you are. If you speak English with an American accent and you go to England, you don’t have to learn how to speak with a British accent. But you do have to understand what other people say to you. The secret is to practice listening to different accents.

As teachers, it is our job to expose students to as many varieties of English as possible. Nowadays, most textbooks have listening comprehension activities in a variety of accents, and that is the reason. However, there is a lot that students can do on their own.

The website The Audio Archive is very good to help that. On this site, you can find sound samples by English speakers from around the world. The spoken texts have been chosen for their usefulness in accent determination.

Take a look:

https://alt-usage-english.org/audio_archive.shtml

On The Audio Archive you have the opportunity to listen to the same text read by different speakers with different accents. It’s very interesting for you to compare the different accents. There are even native speakers from different regions of the same country, whose English sounds a lot different.

Here are a few examples with the text “Arthur, the Rat:”

Australian accent:

https://alt-usage-english.org/archive/arth_mb.mp3

Canadian accent:

https://alt-usage-english.org/archive/art_min8.mp3

British accent:

https://alt-usage-english.org/archive/arth_rp.mp3

Indian accent:

https://alt-usage-english.org/archive/art_in8.mp3

Irish accent:

https://alt-usage-english.org/archive/arth_ire8.mp3

Midwestern American accent:

https://alt-usage-english.org/archive/art_mi4.mp3

New York American accent:

https://alt-usage-english.org/archive/01un01d.mp3

Listening comprehension is a matter of practicing. You can tell your students that it’s OK if they find some of the accents difficult to understand. What they can do then is to try to listen to more samples of the same accent. They can watch movies, youtube videos, they can listen to podcasts and a lot more. The more they practice, the more they will understand.

Everything gets better with practice. As teachers we have to encourage our students to practice more. This will help them to become more independent learners. And they will be more confident when speaking English.

Carlos Gontow is an English teacher, actor and teacher trainer. He has had about 27 years of experience teaching children, teenagers and adults. He’s involved with teaching English through theater, games and songs. He’s the author of the books “The Classroom is a Stage – 40 Short Plays for English Students,” “101 Dicas Para Você Aprender Inglês Com Sucesso,” and “Aprenda Inglês Cantando e Aprenda a Cantar em Inglês,” published by DISAL. He’s also the author of the blog “Dicas Para Aprender Inglês”

https://dicasingles.wordpress.com

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