Native speakers wanted!

[Ralf]

[Stew.t.]

hi

I concur with Torsten´s general premise that exposure means you define the kind of English you are exposed to as comprehensible.
Exposed to Scottish English, and taught by a Scot will give you a higher sense of this often dialectically heavy version. However you may have problems with say Ozzie (Australian) English.

Most of my students as they are used to my accent (which is not as strong as some of you think, in comparison to my family), find it easy to comprehend. I had one intermediate to upper intermediate level group that had an Okie (guy from Oklahoma) teacher for three years before me, which had difficulties with my accent in the beginning. This is only natural.

However he has this southern drawl anecdotal style to speech and teaching, that contrasts with my East Midland to Northern British accent that as Jamie pointed out has elements of parsody ( which dates back to my acting and performance poetry days www.kantalk.com/Recording/Play/ID/4285

There are many accents in BrE and this can cause problems, however if we take Alex´s observation of "the office", this is a very regional accent that is not going to turn up in many BrE mainstream films.

But accents are hard if you are not exposed to them, I recently met my first person from Stuttgart, it took some concentration in my listening.
But this is normal for anything you are not used to.
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Please meet Stewart Tunncilff

[Molly]

[Molly]

[Yankee]

[Molly]

[Yankee]

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I'd say they'd have more trouble with the second speaker.
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"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." ~ Abraham Lincoln

[Torsten]

[Yankee]

Hi Torsten

When I was in Germany, I constantly told my students that they had to do more than simply attend an English course once or twice a week. I had one class that spontaneously started finishing my sentence for me whenever I began "Even if you only turn on CNN as background noise for half an hour every day..." :lol:

It is generally pretty obvious which students in any given ESL class do more than simply attend the class.
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"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." ~ Abraham Lincoln

[Molly]

[Mohammad Ahmad]

Hi ,terston .. what a job do you have in your net of teaching English language? say that you are a face of government or others! please here I came only for intersting and spending the wasts of time , yes in the previos year my goal is to learn English or any scine in American universites, but I was attached in the yahoo page costumers that I cant gate the success in united state, and the American lady whome she reply to me the message said that your figurative language or your figure of speech is a weak , from that date I applied my application to an evening collage of translation English for arabic in my country , that is the whole story .. thank you Toeston .. I hope to get the advantage here by presenting every day in the english-test.net.
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MMA

[Lost_Soul]

[Lost_Soul]

[Torsten]

Hi Alex,

The interesting thing is that so many ESL learners use the term "British accent" in the singular form. There actually is no such thing as just one "British accent". People in Great Britain and Ireland use a variety of accents and I think that's the reason why so many learners have difficulty understanding "British English".

As you mentioned, to understand a spoken English basically means two things:
1) You understand speech phonetically. That's what you mean by "make out American speech".
2) You understand the meaning of what's being said.

Many learners of English are not aware of this distinction. They just say that they don't understand native speakers without making the effort to analyze what exactly it is that they don't "understand".

TOEFL listening lectures: A university lecture on Modern World History

[Molly]