And eliminate reductions  ... such as "wanna".  I teach my students reductions and what they mean, and then tell them to NOT use them because reductions + accent = confusion for the listener!

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From: englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov on behalf of Muro, Andres
Sent: Tue 8/21/2007 4:40 AM
To: The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List; englishlanguage at nifl.gov
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 1696] Re: Accent Reduction - IdeasforSpecialTopics Dis...


 
Appreciate any ideas (feasible) about changing the world.
 
Try to help them acquire fluency in reading, writing and listening skills. You may also wanna try to help them enunciate as clearly as possible. Who cares about accents. As someone else said, the students most likely will have the accent of their own cultural group. 
 
Proper enunciation and accent reduction are different things. The former relates to intelligibility, the later refers to elimination of cultural traits.  Talking about accent reduction gives students the idea that their cultural group doesn't' speak properly and that they should sound like Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings, or Carol Kouric, who allegedly don't have accents. It sounds like most people wanna focus on the former. As long as they don't sound like W it's ok. 
 
Andres
 
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