Great talk at the British Council

 

    

 Helen Ashton and Sarah Shepherd

I went to a startlingly brilliant talk on accents at the British Council in London on Thursday 16th. It was given by two people who are somewhat outside the ELT professon: they are accent coaches who work with actors, and teach in schools of drama – but who also work with non-native speakers of English. I had met one of them briefly before, and was therefore astonished to hear that she began the talk in a Scottish accent, which did not coincide with my memory of her voice. I put this down to either obtuseness (on my part) or as a sign that I was ageing rather more rapidly than I had supposed. But in fact I soon realised that this accent (which was utterly convincing) was part of the plan, and was not her ‘home’ accent at all. More on this later.

It was a scripted talk, performed from two lecterns with Helen Ashton to the left, and Sarah Shepherd to the right, who took it in turns to read and perform their script. Between them was placed a screen onto which were projected the images and some words to accompany the talk. This in itself was an exemplary use of the different media of communication – a great balance of the two voices with a perfect use of images on the screen. A lecture I had been to the previous week was the exact opposite, as Professor X went through his powerpoint, the slides got denser and the font-size got smaller: many of them were word-cramped to the point of constipation. Not so with Helen and Sarah.

They have just published a book with Collins Work on your Accent which does ‘accent softening’, and uses modern RP (p. 6) as the model. Sarah defines accent softening (here on her website) as:

Accent softening is the term used to describe the process of lessening any ‘strong’ accent, either international or regional, and creating a geographically ‘neutral’ English accent. The overall goal of accent softening is always that of greater clarity of communication.

The aim of their book is to help people soften their strong accents (whether regional British, or other L1) in order to become more intelligible, and (crucially) to avoid/neutralise as far as possible the prejudicial reactions that people have to accents.

And it was this latter point – prejudice – that was the focus of their talk. The points they made included:

• RP is an accent: people who speak it, speak with an accent – they are not accent-free
• RP is changing – even the Queen’s accent has changed over the years
• Other accents are equally valid
• Your accent is an oral fingerprint, a key part of your identity

As they progressed through the talk they used five different accents: Scottish, old RP (of the type you can hear on a John Wells webpage  here), Cockney/Estuary, General American, and Modern RP. A real tour de force.

The main part was scripted, but they also handled the Q/A session very well also. What was fascinating was the range of responses and comments from the audience: from one person who asserted that people with Estuary (or Essex, I am not sure) accents were just lazy (brilliant response from Helen: ‘All accents are lazy’), to the person (from the Caribbean, for whom English is a first language) who said she had been the butt of prejudicial comments about her accent (a native-speaker accent, remember) but who added ‘I now don’t care!’

Great stuff. It should be available on the web sometime soon – it was streamed live on the night.