Learn to love your non-native accent: Beating Speaking Anxiety — Transcript

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1. 0:03Have you ever had a conversation with someone and
2. 0:06they just couldn't understand you?
3. 0:08If you've had this experience, it's easy to lose confidence.
4. 0:11You may even avoid speaking.
5. 0:14When this happens, you might build insecurities about your pronunciation
6. 0:18or your accent.
7. 0:19You may even want to lose your accent entirely
8. 0:22with the goal of achieving a native accent.
9. 0:26But is having a native accent really a necessary goal to have?
10. 0:32One thing to understand is that there is not just one native accent.
11. 0:36Even the UK has many different accents
12. 0:39and some can be quite difficult to understand. And remember,
13. 0:43the majority of English speakers are actually non-native speakers.
14. 0:48So, to be understood, you don't need a perfect native accent.
15. 0:53What you want to aim for is something called intelligibility.
16. 0:57Now, intelligibility is
17. 0:59how well you can be understood by different speakers of English.
18. 1:04It didn't matter what accent you had.
19. 1:07I mean, if you're German, your accent would sound German.
20. 1:10If you're Japanese, your accent would sound Japanese, and so on.
21. 1:14As long as you made sure that your accent was intelligible
22. 1:18to the person you were speaking to.
23. 1:21Here at the BBC Learning English speaking confidence workshop,
24. 1:25we showed some English learners different English accents.
25. 1:28Hello, I'm Audrey Brown and today in Focus on Africa,
26. 1:32the deadly dangers of trying to get an education in Cameroon.
27. 1:35According to UNICEF, millions of children are out of school
28. 1:40in the Middle East and North Africa.
29. 1:42We start with the story of a tiny dog who went on a huge adventure.
30. 1:47And many of these learners found the accents quite similar
31. 1:51and said they were easy to understand.
32. 1:54This five accent is like similar for me.
33. 1:58And what do you think is more important:
34. 2:01communicating well, or having the perfect native accent?
35. 2:06Well, it's a good question.
36. 2:07I think communicating well.
37. 2:09But also you have to improve your English at the same time.
38. 2:14But communication is the most important thing.
39. 2:17I think that.
40. 2:19So if you change your goal from having the perfect accent
41. 2:22to being able to communicate effectively,
42. 2:25you might feel a bit less anxious about speaking.
43. 2:29So what can we do to make sure we're communicating effectively?
44. 2:34Try to find people with lots of different first languages
45. 2:38to practise with.
46. 2:39And if you do have a situation where someone doesn't understand you,
47. 2:43ask them what it was that they didn't understand.
48. 2:46You'll quickly learn
49. 2:47what parts of your pronunciation might be causing confusion.
50. 2:52And lastly, try not to take it personally
51. 2:55when someone doesn't understand you.
52. 2:57Maybe they just didn't hear you.
53. 2:59And that's it for now.
54. 3:00But if you enjoyed this video, make sure you check out
55. 3:03the podcast episode, where you'll hear more from experts about this topic.
56. 3:08Goodbye for now.