JEDDAH, 8 March 2006 — Local parents — both Saudi and Western — agree that, like it or not, accent counts. When it comes to teaching English or using English as a medium for teaching other subjects, all else being equal, parents and students prefer native speakers to non-native speakers.
The feeling is especially strong among parents who pay school fees. At one well-known international school, at least one teacher was released from duty as a result of feedback from students and parents about accent.
Abu Muhammad, a Saudi who speaks fluent English, said: “When my son is old enough, he will go to kindergarten at a school where English is the medium of instruction and I want it from native English speakers throughout his entire education.” He said that his main concern was with intelligibility rather than accent but when pressed, he preferred native speakers from Europe, the US or the Antipodean countries.
A senior American academic and teacher reinforced this view. “Parents just want a white face,” he said. “I got that all the time in my administrative experience. They are willing to overlook lesser official credentials in order to be exposed to a model of English that is actually being used by a person from a Western country that includes all the slang and expressions that are not taught in textbooks.”
Teachers who were not themselves raised in Western cultures, he continued, typically did not have that facility with English. Parents also wanted to prepare their child for the possibility of advanced studies in a Western country. To help their children to adapt to the subtleties of the host country, the Western teacher can expose them to the “hidden curriculum,” the one taught that is not academic and is embedded in the language, such as values, procedures, activities, organizational skills and personal and social management.
At the beginning of a child’s formal education, it is important to have a Western accent, no matter what the color of the teacher. The accent takes on less importance in subjects such as advanced sciences and math. However, the methods of teaching take on increased importance as students mature and Western methods, generally speaking, are decidedly different from Middle Eastern and Asian ones.
In advanced subjects for college preparation, student achievement is the ultimate goal, no matter what the method of teaching or the nationality of the teacher.
There was a lot of pressure from parents of all cultures to see white faces. Teachers from other well-known schools privately supported this phenomenon. The whole standard goes down in English because the perception among the parents, who pay the bills, is that the school is not based on Western culture — British or American.
The fact that some major schools in the Kingdom base their entire curriculum and cultural ethos largely in Western culture is the reason that many parents from cultures outside Europe and America send their children to the schools in the first place.
It has not been many years since Saudis were first allowed to attend international schools that taught a Western curriculum. Saudi law only allows one official school from each foreign country which wants their national curriculum to be taught in Jeddah, Dhahran and Riyadh. Even now, express permission has to be sought for Saudi nationals’ attendance and for attendance for Muslims. According to the former director of one international school, these two permissions are now fairly easy to obtain.
Attendance of Saudi students whose parents pay considerable sums for their sons and daughters to go to these schools reflects the desire to have their children taught by what they perceive as the best source of English as well as academic subjects.
At university level, students tend to be slightly less discriminating in their preferences. “As long as the teacher speaks clearly and with a good accent, it doesn’t matter where he is from,” said Abdullah Al-Ghamdi, English student at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.
English lecturer Douglas Vale said that he had observed a preference for European accents but felt that the teaching style was equally as important. “The students do not respond well to didactic lecturing,” he said. “I find involving them in interesting topical and relevant material is equally important; clarity rather than origin of the accent is the key.”
The desire by parents for native speaker teachers is understandable in one sense; the assumption that underlies it is that the student is going to source and that the language and accent is somehow authentic.
It is a fact however that accents across England vary considerably. Listen to a heavy Newcastle accent and compare it with Estuarine English, Lancastrian or the West Country to appreciate the variety.
Include America in the picture as a country full of native English speakers and the variety of accents multiplies hugely.
“Global English” is a term becoming increasingly fashionable. It suggests that English is spoken in every part of the world, both among speakers within a single country who share a first language, and with speakers from different countries or first languages.
English is no longer spoken only by its native speakers in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand, and by those who learn English in order to communicate with native speakers. It is also spoken among non-native speakers within India, the Philippines and Singapore and internationally among non-native speakers from a wide range of countries. This latter use of English is usually called “English as an International Language” (EIL) and is spoken by around 1.5 billion people. In countries with many hundreds of languages, English is the common language that allows all regions and groups to communicate with each other. Often the mixture of native culture, indigenous dialects, and English form a unique form of English, such as Taglish in the Philippines or Creole in the Caribbean.
Recent research by Dr. Jennifer Jenkins, lecturer in sociolinguistics and phonology at King’s College, London concluded that only a few components in English accents need to be standardized in either teaching or conversation to ensure intelligibility. All the consonants, Jenkins concluded, were important except for “th” sounds as in “thin” and “this”. Consonant clusters were important at the beginning and in the middle of words; the cluster in the word “string” cannot be simplified to “sting” or “tring” and remain intelligible. She also thought that the contrast between long and short vowels was important to retain as was nuclear or tonic stress. Stress can radically change in meaning as in, “The man ATE the biscuit” (as opposed to any other method of disposing of it and “The man ate the BISCUIT,” as opposed to any other food.
Intelligibility however is a minimum standard. Listening and speaking are only the first steps up the hierarchy of English competence. Academic English demands thousands of additional vocabulary words. Further up the hierarchy, the command of English vocabulary to its maximum results in the ability to conceive and elaborate an idea or concept with words or to create great literature. There is a direct correlation between success and the ability to use words to persuade and influence others.
However, it is the perception of what parents are getting for their money that drives the desire for “Native Speakers.” The reality — that accent is perhaps not the prime consideration in the business of communication — comes second when the parent believes it is and pays the piper to produce the right tune.
