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Your email First name Unsubscribe? How do accents affect communication? An accent is a reflection of the unique background of each individual and many people take pride in their individual accent and style. However, having an accent may cause some difficulties in communicating with other native English speakers, both at work and in social situations. For example, when a person speaks a second or third language it is natural for them to do so using the rules of their native language.
However this can be quite different to English and may not sound right to native speakers of the language, making it difficult for them to understand. This can cause frustration for the speaker as they are then asked to repeat what they have said or to find another way to explain themselves.
Ineffective communication due to a strong accent can create barriers in business; it may also have negative effects on job performance, cause missed job opportunities, affect educational advancement and everyday life activities. This underestimation of the importance of pronunciation is mainly because students tend to think mistakenly that pronunciation is less important compared to other aspects of the English language such as grammar, lexicology and vocabulary.
Pronunciation is vital to proper communication because the incorrect use of pronunciation inevitably leads to the message being misunderstood by the recipient. Pronunciation of the letter sounds in words as well as syllable emphasis on parts of words will more often than not change the words meaning and context drastically thereby irreversibly altering the meaning of the sentence being communicated.
A good example of this is the word present. How important is good pronunciation for communication? People often say that they don't care about having good pronunciation because they only want to communicate. They say they can communicate even with bad pronunciation. They find their communication skills satisfactory. But perhaps native speakers find bad pronunciation unpleasant and hard to understand. If so, seen from their perspective, such communication is not satisfactory at all.
But perhaps we are needlessly troubling our readers with this issue. We don't know. Therefore we are looking for comments from native speakers who have had contact with foreigners.
Do you sometimes find foreign pronunciation unpleasant? Do you enjoy talking with foreigners even if their accent is very strong? I'd like to quote a portion of an interview with a native speaker of French who talks about poor pronunciation of some learners.
She says that she finds their accent comical, and that she often gets impatient when listening to poor French. On the whole, she seems to get little pleasure from conversing with foreigners whose French accent leaves a lot to be desired.
There are two reasons for this. One comes from my contacts with foreigners who were speaking French. I sometimes found their pronunciation very comical.
I wouldn't actually laugh out loud at them, but I felt as though I was doing them a favor by taking the time to let them struggle with the language. I would usually become quite impatient and 'tune them out,' or I'd try to finish the sentence so that we could get on with the conversation.
The other reason why I'm so concerned with pronunciation was that in dealing with 70 Success with Foreign Languages foreigners, I found that their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary didn't make a big difference. The heavier their accent, the less they were understood.
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