Getting Ahead with Global English

Presenter: Heather Hansen

Reviewed by Sarah Schubert

Heather is passionate about English and this was obvious in her energy and delivery of a topic close to her heart. This is a topic that has received recent press attention as well, with MM Lee Kuan Yew commenting on the move away from the traditional British English being taught in schools to more American English.

Heather shared with us some interesting facts about English Speakers across the world – only one million people actually speak BBC English, and yet this is the preferred pronunciation taught. When you consider that there are more non-native English speakers in the world than there are native English speakers, we need to consider whether the BBC English pronunciation is really the way forward?

As speakers and trainers we will have a lot of non-native English speakers in our classes so we need to be conscious of our own pronunciation and style. To prove this point, we all participated in a fun pronunciation quiz where we had to say certain words to a partner from a list and he/she had to note which words we said. As expected, there was some confusion and it was interesting to see that what we said wasn’t always what was heard!

Heather shared three key things we need to be aware of when pronouncing English words:

1)  Use clear consonants

• Be conscious of the voiced and unvoiced consonants. i.e. veggies vs weggies. These are two very different things and having veggies for dinner sounds more appetising than weggies!
• Be familiar with the intervocalic ‘t’ in British English – butter, water, better.
• Be familiar with the rhotic ‘r’ in American English – car, park, far, cart.
• Use tongue twisters to practise articulating different words and consonants – ‘Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry, Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry’ and ‘River Valley Road’.

2)  Use short and long vowels correctly

• For long vowels your voice needs to go up and then glide down for example: cane, meet, mope, cute.
• For short vowels there should be no voice change, for example: can, met, mop, cut.

3)  Chunk your messages

Ensure you are using the right word intonation and stress to convey your message appropriately. Decide which words in a passage are more important and need to be stressed, and make sure you stress the right syllable.

This was a great session, where we all learned something new about a topic most of us thought we were familiar with! Thanks for sharing your passion and expertise with us, Heather!