Accents Should Be Taught In English Essay

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his raises some question regarding whether or not as teachers, we should modify our accent or the children should modify theirs to learn phonics. Jolliffe and Waugh (2012)advise that we learn to modify our accents dependent on whom we are speaking to or the situation. As such we develop a wardrobe of accents. They conclude that teachers need to be sensitive to regional accents and deal with difficulties on a ‘common sense basis’ (DfES, 2007, p. 19). Accents can be considered a challenge when teaching phonics due to the possible variation between child and teacher (Jolliffe and Waugh, 2012), and can lead to tension and misunderstandings. Yet Miskin (2006) maintains that all but four or five of the 44 sounds are pronounced the same across all accents. Waugh and Jolliffe (2012) recognise that some teachers can be uncertain how to correctly enunciate phonemes due to their lack of experience with phonics. Poor enunciation of phonemes in point, the use of ‘schwa’ (see Appendix p.15) at the end of letters such as ‘puh’ for ‘p’ and ‘huh’ for ‘h’, could result in children struggling to blend phonemes correctly and misspelling words. …show more content…

Many parents are unaware of how reading is taught in school. To overcome this many schools are introducing phonics workshops to teach parents about expectations of children, correct pronunciation and provide a forum for their questions about phonics. This provides the opportunity for both parents and school to provide the child with phonic strategies both at home and at school with them both utilising the same approach and removing misunderstandings. In practice I have also noted a home learning book that accompanies the child’s reading book home filled with information and activities on teaching phonics and how to get the most from the reading of a

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