There is a tendency among English students to think that one particular accent or variety of English is "better" than others. In this sense, Europeans mostly support the British accent while people from other latitudes support the American. I personally love accents and think we should enjoy the variety English has to offer in spite of the extra difficulty they might add to the understanding of a foreign language . As a matter of fact, we should not forget that the standard English we try to learn in our school is spoken by a really low percentage of native speakers and that we will have to deal with infinite variations when facing real situations (starting with the Spanish accent most teachers will probably have).
To start with, I would like you to watch a video from YAPPR, a very interesting link for students of English. They have a wide variety of videos (songs, film trailers, excerpts from TV programmes, etc.) accompanied by their transcription and sometimes translation. You can also join their community and help with the translations and transcriptions.
In this particular video an Australian actor, Simon Baker, is interviewed in a popular American programme, the Late Show, where the speaker, David Letterman, comments on the Australian accent while he praises the actor's ability to hide it in the American series he stars, The Mentalist:
As an intermediate student, can you really tell the difference between David Letterman and Simon Baker? Probably not, so why all the fuss about accents at this stage?
More accents? The following link is just about accents in Britain and includes recordings of different conversations from a wide variety of places around the British Isles:
The following one is a link about North American accents which works in a similar way:
So, now the question is: Why do we use "RP" as our reference in class if so few speakers use it in everyday life? Surf the net and find some information about the concepts of "international English", "standard English" and "English as lingua franca" before trying to answer this question.
To express your opinion on this topic, please use the "comments" link below.
