​While our focus lies in accent modification, several clients over the years have asked to practice small talk, polite conversation with strangers, colleagues, or other acquaintances. Which conversation topics should be avoided? And which are culturally-appropriate? How can I keep a conversation going? I’m asked these questions often, and I work with clients to help them better understand American cultural expectations and to develop and practice a repertoire of conversational topics.

​It’s first important to point out that appropriate topics for small talk differ around the world. While living in Turkey in my late-twenties, my cheeks turned pink more than once when newly introduced strangers asked me why I wasn’t yet married with kids or when my Turkish roommate’s aunt told me I’d put on weight. I noticed, too, that salaries were talked about more openly among friends in Turkey than in the U.S.  Recently, when I asked a class of refugees from various countries who are living in the U.S. about good small talk topics, religion and side hustle sales pitches were mentioned. Any of these topics could shut down an attempt at small talk with an American.

​I think most Americans would agree that three areas to avoid in polite conversation are religion, politics, and personal finances. Unless you already know a colleague or acquaintance’s religious or political conviction, it’s probably best to avoid those controversial topics if you want polite conversation to continue. Personal finances is probably never an appropriate topic, including salaries and the cost of expensive items, like homes, vacations, and jewelry.  A fourth and a fifth area to approach with caution are family and health. Many people enjoy talking about their family, and having children close in age, for example, can be bonding. But for any variety of reasons, others may be reticent to disclose details about their family. Asking about health, too, may be a welcome subject for some, but may be seen as prying or taxing by others. As any newcomer to the U.S. discovers quickly, when a stranger or acquaintance asks, “How are you?” he or she doesn’t want or expect a detailed response – or maybe any response at all!

​So, we’ve established some topics to avoid or to approach with caution. Next, we’ll take a look at culturally appropriate topics. But, inspired by recent conversations with a client from China, I’d like to take a detour here. I promise it will lead us back. This client confided to me that he has a difficult time maintaining conversations in English with Americans. After digging a little deeper, I found that he has a tendency to “jump” an unspoken protocol of intimacy development, expecting (and divulging) too much, too quickly from (and to) strangers and acquaintances. Let me clarify, when I use the word “intimacy,” I’m referring to emotional closeness, not sexual behavior.

​Let’s take a look at what’s happening at a theoretical level when we engage in interpersonal communication. Social penetration theory, developed by Altman and Taylor in the early 70’s, suggests that as we get to know one another, we’re engaging in a process of mutual self-disclosure whereby our conversations move from shallow, non-intimate topics to progressively more personal ones. This process is likened to peeling back the skin of an onion, where the outermost layers represent broad, superficial topics, and the inner layers represent highly personal ones

​In U.S. culture, some of the outermost layers include biographical data, like major, hometown, job (but not age or weight!), and interests, whereas innermore layers include religion, politics, and fears. These outermost layers serve as good small talk topics: hometowns, schools, jobs, hobbies, movies, books, sports. I’ll add to that list weather and current events, though neither necessarily involves self-disclosure. 

If the small talk evolves into the formation of a relationship over time, the disclosure must be reciprocal and gradually include the innermore layers. Therefore, the breadth (i.e., scope) and depth of the topics increase as a relationship becomes more intimate.  If the self-disclosure starts to become one-sided (that is, only one person is doing most of the disclosing) or if a person jumps too deep into the onion too soon, intimacy levels may move backward, and the relationship could fade away.

Similar principles can be applied to polite conversation: if one speaker is doing most of the disclosing or jumping too deep into the onion, a conversation may break down. I advise clients who need help maintaining polite conversation to volley questions back and forth with their conversational partner; that is, don’t do all the asking or all the answering.

In addition, I remind clients that polite conversation generally covers only the first couple of layers of the onion; it’s not a mission to its center. An exception to this is known as the stranger-on-the-train phenomenon, whereby strangers rapidly and spontaneously reveal personal information about themselves. This is markedly different from social penetration theory, in which the disclosure of information is strategic, and disclosing too much too soon can make listeners uncomfortable. Theories for why the stranger-on-the-train phenomenon sometimes happens include the idea that the strangers feel less vulnerable to judgement or criticism by another stranger or that they experience emotional catharsis by divulging deep thoughts to someone they know they will never meet again.
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Finally, it’s good to remember that intercultural communication, beyond topic choice and language barriers, has its own challenges: speakers from different countries may have different norms and values and may need to co-construct new meanings. But these challenges can also be part of the joy and excitement of communicating with people from different cultures.

By Jennie Parker

Mid-semester, my students, who came to the U.S. from many countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Italy, China, South Korea, and Ivory Coast, gave oral presentations. The main learning objective was to deliver a well-prepared, organized, coherent presentation. A secondary objective was to address English language skills. As part of this, I designed a special section of the rubric where I listed mispronounced words and their corrections.

I will never forget a student from China who spoke clear English with a Mandarin accent. Though she had presented beautifully and earned an A, when I handed back her feedback, her face got red, and her hand shot up in the air. She scolded me in front of the class for implying that her accent was “wrong” and somehow inferior to mine.
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I was taken aback. That was certainly not what I had intended to do, and the only reference to accent at all on the rubric was implicit: the list of mispronounced words and their corrections. I thought I was helping her and her classmates to communicate more clearly with their North American peers and professors.

Was I wrong to include pronunciation? I felt ashamed for having offended her, but also confused. Wasn’t part of my job as an ESL instructor to address pronunciation? If so, how could I have done so in a way that would have been better received? The search for these answers led me to a wealth of sociolinguistics literature on accent.

First, let’s be clear, we all speak with an accent. The way we pronounce vowels and consonants and apply word stress, rhythm, and intonation all contribute to what is our accent. In the United States, the majority of people speak English with an accent referred to as General American English; most Americans would say this accent lacks any distinctive characteristics, and it may be erroneously described as “unaccented.” In addition to this standard accent, some estimate there are roughly 24 additional nonstandard accents in the United States, which may point to a speaker’s regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics. But when you think of English as a global language, for it is spoken by nearly 1.5 billion people around the world, the number of accents increases to roughly 160.

So, which accent is correct? No governmental or royal society exists to regulate the English language, and most linguists would agree that there is no one correct, valid English accent. Well, then, which accent is most desirable? That depends on the listener. Own-accent bias suggests that people prefer to hear their own accent. Accent helps us to distinguish our in-group from out-groups. The logic goes, those who speak like us are the most similar to us. But is that true?

Our perceptions of others’ accents depend on our social and cultural associations with that accent. In other words, accent triggers our stereotypes of a speaker. According to accent prestige theory, accents are used as cues to judge characteristics of speakers. More specifically, these characteristics can be divided into two categories: status (including intelligence, education level, social class, competence, and level of success) and solidarity (including friendliness, trustworthiness, and kindness). Studies have shown that the standard accent is rated higher in both categories by people who speak the standard accent (such as General American in the U.S.). However, those who speak with a nonstandard accent also give higher ratings to those who speak with a standard accent in the status category, but rate those who speak with an accent similar to their own higher in the solidarity category.

Since moving from the Midwest to the South over 20 years ago, I’ve become more sensitive to how some of these stereotypes tend to play out in movies. It seems that oftentimes, characters with a Southern accent in film and animation are friendly but dim-witted. Think Mater in Cars. In contrast, British accents in American theaters are often correlated with prestige or intelligence. Think James Bond.

Unfortunately, in the real world, these accent biases create opportunities for discrimination. John Baugh, a linguistics professor at Washington University, coined the phrase, “linguistic profiling,” which refers to discriminating against a person based on auditory cues, such as dialect and accent. His studies have shown that ethnicity can often accurately be determined from short speech samples – as short as “hello” – and that those who speak with a dialect or accent devalued where they live may fall victim to discrimination in areas such as housing, banking, and medicine. I remember a friend’s British husband joking that in the process of becoming an American citizen, whenever he had to go through security checkpoints in government buildings, he just had to say “hello” and was waved through, avoiding the scrutiny that others endured. Of course, more than auditory cues may have contributed to the guards’ prejudices, but I thought of Baugh’s studies.

Perpetuating accent bias is a real danger of accent training. Awareness should be raised as to the concept of accent bias: of course, a speaker’s accent is not actually an indicator of his intelligence, success, or trustworthiness, for example, but it can elicit social evaluations, perhaps even unconsciously, that put him at an unfair advantage or disadvantage. And completely changing one’s accent to suit the environment is neither easy nor desirable for most. Accent training should, therefore, be approached sensitively with these issues in the minds of both the accent coach and the client.

Certainly, the concept of accent is heavy with meaning: identity, stereotypes, a source of pride or stigma. Yet, another aspect of accent is often overlooked in discussions on it: intelligibility. One’s accent consists of features that trigger far less of an emotional response: pronunciation, word stress, rhythm, and intonation.  To a large extent, these features need to be addressed in language education to help learners be understood. It’s been nearly a decade since I taught that FE class.  In that time, I’ve taught pronunciation (or accent) to thousands of English language learners living in the U.S. who fall up and down the socioeconomic scale, with education levels ranging from little to no formal education to post-graduate degrees. Their feelings on accent have ranged from pride in their native accent to pride in cultivating a General American accent, as well as learners who have given accent identity little to no thought. While anecdotal, I feel comfortable drawing the following conclusion with a degree of certainty: despite their differences, all of these learners want to be understood.

With that in mind and with all I’ve learned about accent and its weight, I’ve devised a simple two-pronged test when it comes to providing feedback on pronunciation. The first question I ask myself is if the feedback is solicited. In other words, has the learner come to me specifically for accent or pronunciation work, or has she come to me with another primary goal, such as fluency or grammar improvement? Next, if the feedback is solicited, I ask myself whether it is necessary. I can only know if it is necessary if I know learners’ goals. Over the years, most have told me that they want to be better understood in English; others have said that they want listeners to focus more on the content of their message and less on the delivery. Far fewer have said that they want to speak English like a North American. These goals determine whether my feedback is necessary. That is, am I providing a correction that improves intelligibility or am I correcting every phoneme that is inconsistent with a General American accent?

When I think back to the FE section that I taught, my pronunciation feedback failed the two-pronged test. The student who was rightly upset with me hadn’t solicited my feedback on pronunciation. Registering for a freshman experience course is very different from registering for an English pronunciation class. I imagine pronunciation feedback was nowhere on the published course description. Second, I hadn’t asked her about her learning goals as they relate to pronunciation, and, furthermore, I would have readily admitted that her English was already highly intelligible. But I gave her feedback, anyway, exposing my unconscious bias that my standard accent was the correct one.
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I cringe when I think back on that experience now (and if you’re reading this, dear student, please accept my sincere apologies). Over the years, I’ve come to regard accent training as moving along a continuum that stretches from unintelligible to intelligible speech for a target audience. The continuum looks different for each English speaker because the audiences may be different and what lies at the very end of the intelligibility scale is the speaker’s target accent. That target may be speaking intelligible English with a Spanish accent, for example, or it may be speaking English with a General American accent, or Received Pronunciation (i.e., the standard British accent), or any of the other over 150 English accents around the globe.  Thus, an effective accent training program must be learner-centered and highly customizable.

By Jennie Parker

​So, just how important are rhythm and intonational patterns to the intelligibility of English? In today’s literature on the subject, linguists are divided. Some claim that suprasegmental elements of speech (that is, features of speech that extend beyond individual sounds, such as word stress, rhythm, and intonation) are more important than the correct articulation of consonants and vowels. Others, however, claim that segmentals – these consonant and vowel sounds - are most important.  A third, more holistic perspective, and one that I embrace, is emerging. It suggests that the debate between suprasegmentals and segmentals is perpetuating a false dichotomy; the interaction between the two affects intelligibility, and they cannot always be separated.

​The first perspective points to studies that suggest that suprasegmentals, or prosody, play the most vital role in the overall intelligibility of speech. For example, English rhythm and intonation patterns provide information about what is important to a speaker’s message. Use of correct rhythm and intonation patterns is correlated with better intelligibility, higher proficiency ratings by native speakers, and better listener comprehension and recall. In contrast, nonnative rhythm and intonation patterns, including misplaced focus or stressing all words in an utterance equally, may elicit negative evaluations of the speaker and make sentence processing more difficult for the listener.

In contrast, other studies suggest that the correct articulation of phonemes has a larger impact on intelligibility than suprasegmentals. This may be especially true with regard to interactions between nonnative speakers of English. Because there are more nonnative speakers of English in the world than native speakers, some argue that more studies should assess the intelligibility of the speech of nonnative speakers speaking to other nonnative speakers (most studies involve nonnative speakers speaking to native speakers). Some studies suggest that when nonnative speakers employ correct elements of prosody, nonnative listeners actually have a more difficult time understanding what is said.

I tend to agree with a third, emerging perspective, however. In my experience, the interaction between segmental and suprasegmental elements of speech affect intelligibility, and sometimes, the two cannot be separated. For example, for native speakers of Mandarin and Japanese, a common communication problem in English is the insertion of a vowel sound between consonants in consonant clusters or after consonant clusters. So, while the vowel insertion is of a segmental nature, it involves syllables and word stress, as well. Thus, it is important for pronunciation instruction to address both segmental and suprasegmental elements. Furthermore, because language transfer issues differ depending on a learner’s first language, it is imperative for language educators to be able to shift instruction to address elements of speech that are most significantly impacting intelligibility for individual learners.

So what does all of this mean for the English language learner? It's important to address both segmentals (i.e., consonant and vowel production), as well as suprasegmentals (including word stress, rhythm, and intonation) in your English language instruction. An effective language instructor will research or have experience with common transfer issues from your first language and be able to assess your own speech for what is interfering most significantly with intelligibility. He or she will then help you to address those issues first in controlled language exercises and then in spontaneous speech.

Cemetery.  I'll never forget its spelling because it's the word I missed in the second-grade spelling bee. The concept of spelling bees - spelling competitions - or even explicit spelling lessons may be foreign to you if you speak a highly-phonetic language, such as Turkish, Spanish, Czech, or Italian. English orthography, however, is highly nonphonemic.  How did English become such a mess? It's a long tale of borrowed letters and words, phonological shift, and the lack of a governing body overseeing the consistency and expansion of the language.

Let's start around the 5th Century AD. After the Romans left England, Germanic tribes invaded and settled, forming what became known as Old English from various West Germanic dialects. By the 6th Century, the Roman alphabet was adopted to express the language in written form, but there were more sounds than letters, leading to one of the first issues with English spelling.

In addition to juxtaposing the Roman alphabet onto English, which was problematic but not uncommon, we have the issue of words borrowed from other languages. With the Norman invasion of England beginning in 1066, French became the language of the English aristocracy, while the lower classes continued speaking English. French words related to politics and legislation, for example, such as evidence, justice, and soldiers, entered the English language.  Sometimes spelling was adapted to match pronunciation, and sometimes pronunciation was adapted to match French spelling, leading to more confusion.

The influence of other languages on English continued with the introduction of the printing press in 1476.  While the printing press ushered in a desire for spelling consistency, it actually led to more confusion. Many printers were Dutch, and they sometimes used Dutch spellings for words, such as ghost with its silent "h."  Over the next couple of hundred years, scholars attempted to standardize English by writing spellling guides. However, there was little collaboration or agreement, so these early attempts were futile. Some wrote guides that were descriptive, reflecting how people actually wrote the language. Others were more prescriptive, devising rules and standards for the way people should write the language.

Around this time, English was also going through what would become known as the Great Vowel Shift (roughly 1400-1700). The cause of this shift is debated, but it resulted in a change in the way Middle English long vowels, as well as a few consonants, were pronounced. For example, the word bite had been pronounced "beet," and the word meat had been pronounced "met" before the Great Vowel Shift. Many scholars attribute the nonphonetic nature of English primarily to this Great Vowel Shift.

To make matters even more complicated, in the 16th and 17th centuries, scholars began borrowing words from Latin and Greek for scientific and technicial concepts and altering English spelling to reflect the classical roots of words. For example, "det" became debt from the Latin debitum.  And, conversely, across the Atlantic, in 1828, Noah Webster published the first dictionary of the American English language, putting an American spin on the language by removing some of the French influence on words.  For example, "colour" became color, and "centre" became center in American English.

Finally, as English language learners know, English is truly a global language.  It is estimated there are over 400 million native English speakers in the world and over one billion people for whom English is a second language. And while there is some consensus as to what constiutes both standard written English and standard regional accents, there is no royal, governmental, or international regulatory body overseeing the rules of English or the expansion of the language.  English remains open to the influence of other languages, phonological shifts, and tension between prescriptivists and descriptivists in areas such as grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and the inclusion of new words.

 So, don't feel badly if you have trouble pronouncing English. Even native English speakers may have a difficult time pronouncing a word that is new to them. When in doubt, I check the pronunciation in a dictionary, but I am also familiar with phonological guidelines that dictate correct pronunciation much of the time. I've compiled the guidelines here to help you out.  Please comment below if you have questions, and I'll do my best to answer quickly!

​I also think of “schwa” as lazy because we turn many unstressed syllables into the “schwa” sound. In fact, roughly 20% of words in English contain a “schwa.” The sound can be spelled with any vowel, as in relative, elephant, mistake, today, and difficult, and a few vowel combinations, as in motion. So, within a word, unstressed syllables are often shortened to “schwa;” in addition, within a sentence, unstressed words (i.e., function words) are often shortened to “schwa,” as well. (See “Understanding the Rhythm of English” for more on rhythm and function words).

In these examples, the vowels in many of the function words are reduced to “schwa.” Remember, function words include articles, prepositions, pronouns, and positive auxiliaries.

For some fun facts about “schwa,” see language blogger and linguist Arika Okrent’s post, which describes “schwa” as the laziest sound there is! https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56821/9-fun-facts-about-schwa
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*the same sound is also sometimes represented as /ʌ/ when the syllable is stressed, as in under and Doug.

This blog post first appeared in English Unraveled on the Service Speak, LLC site on October 11, 2017.

First, it is useful to understand that English is generally considered a stress-timed language, whereas many languages are considered syllable-timed (though some would argue that all languages are stress-timed but to varying degrees). To the English language learner, however, I think that understanding the concept of stress-timed is helpful; it is not necessary to debate the degree to which English rhythm is similar or dissimilar to the rhythm of other languages.

In each of these sentences, only three syllables are prominently stressed. I have highlighted the stressed syllables in all caps. A stressed syllable is louder, longer, and higher in pitch than the other syllables. Because English is a stress-timed language, it should take the speaker roughly the same amount of time to say each sentence because each sentence has three stressed syllables, despite the fact that the sixth sentence, for example, has nine syllables, and the first has only five.

As a result, many of the unstressed syllables get smooshed (my very scientific way of describing the phenomenon).  Take, for example, the fourth sentence. A native speaker does not clearly articulate "should have" but says, "should-ə"  or "should-əv." In the fifth sentence, "children will" becomes "children'll."  In the sixth, "playing" becomes "playin'."  In general, the unstressed syllables are shortened and weakened. This may explain why many non-native English speakers complain that when they first arrive in the U.S., they feel that Americans slur their speech or speak too quickly.

As I mentioned above, luckily, the stressed words are somewhat predictable.  We call the stressed words content words and the unstressed words function words.  Content words carry most of the meaning of an utterance. They generally include nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and negative auxiliaries, such as "won't," "didn't," "shouldn't," etc. Function words include most other words, such as articles, prepositions, and positive auxiliaries. As with most aspects of English, there are always exceptions to these rules, but this is a general framework that is useful to understand.

As you might have guessed, rhythm in English is more complex than the difference between content and function words. Other major concepts include thought groups and focus words, as well as reasons to break these general rules. However, the distinction between content words and function words is the best place to start, and future blog posts will address some of these other concepts.

Now what? So, hopefully, you understand what a stress-timed language is and how to distinguish between content and function words. But how do you apply this knowledge? It is not something that will come quickly to you at a dinner party, for example, as you are talking with your friends. However, it is something that you can start to be aware of as you listen to native speakers around you, listen to the radio, and watch television. Start to hone in on the strong and weak elements of their speech.  When you practice rhythm at home, I suggest that you download transcripts of audio material and mark the content words (NPR.org is a good resource for this). Then listen to the audio several times and check to see whether your markings were correct.  Then practice the transcripts. And practice. And practice. You might want to record yourself. You will be surprised by what you catch in your speech when you listen to a recording of it. Slowly, with time and practice, this rhythm pattern will become part of your natural speech.

One of the most pervasive pronunciation problems in English is the distinction between /i/, as in "sheep," and /ɪ/, as in "ship." Your first language will influence whether you can easily hear and articulate the distinction between these two vowel sounds. This distinction is very clear to native English speakers, and many words lose their intended meaning if the wrong sound is substituted.  The following list of minimal pairs gives you an idea of why it is so important to pronounce these vowels correctly (and it also provides good listening practice):

The /i/ phoneme is an example of a tense vowel.  When articulating tense vowels, the muscles in your lips and tongue should be tense, or tight. To make the /i/ sound, open your mouth slightly, and move your tongue high towards the roof of your mouth and forward towards your front teeth (but not touching your teeth). The sides of your tongue should be pressing the roof of your mouth.  We particularly like the Sounds American channel for phoneme practice.  I've posted the /i/ video below.

/ɪ/, however, is a lax vowel. The muscles in your lips and tongue should be relaxed.  To make the /ɪ/ sound, open your mouth slightly, and move your tongue high towards the roof of your mouth and forward.  Your tongue should be relaxed and not touching your teeth or the roof of your mouth. The Sounds American video is below:

Spelling in English can be tricky. The /i/ sound is most often spelled with a "y," as in pretty, lady, and kitty.  The /ɪ/ is most often spelled with an "i," as in brick, middle, and lid.  Please see our Sound Chart for a more complete list of spellings.

In 2005, when I was training to be an English instructor at the British Council in Istanbul, our trainer, who was a native English speaker from Tasmania, always teased me and another Midwestern American classmate about the way we referred to "you" in plural form: "you guys." He'd say, there's no "guys" in the grammar books! And years later, when I started teaching English in Atlanta, Georgia, my "you guys" gradually changed to "y'all." This is one example of dialectical variation within the United States.  Some estimate there are over 24 different English dialects in the United States alone. Dialect includes not only word choice and grammar, but pronunciation, as well.

Therefore, I am always amused when English language learners say their goal is to speak English without an accent.  While I applaud such learners for their ambition and motivation, it would be impossible for anyone - even native speakers - to speak without an accent.  A more realistic goal would be to speak English with a clear accent.  In the United States, when English language learners refer to "English without an accent," they may be referring to General American, the dialect of English that they often hear in media, particularly national radio or television broadcasts. This dialect is often found in the central region of the United States though it is worth noting that even within this area, variations of speech exist (see map below).
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​So, what makes an accent clear?  The short answer is that a clear accent is easily understood by others.  This may seem simple, but if you've learned English in your home country and re-located to the United States, you may be surprised by how UNCLEAR native English speakers seem to you.  That's probably because the textbook English that you learned is very different from how native speakers actually talk.