Title:
An Archive of English, Spoken in Many Different
Accents
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
Steven Weinberger is the director of linguistics in
the English Department at George Mason University in
Fairfax, Virginia. Students in his beginning
phonetics class are mostly interested in teaching
English as a second language. They wanted to study
how non-native speakers pronounce different sounds.
"So we sent the students out to record non-native
speakers, and we compared those speakers to each
other and to native speakers of English."Professor
Weinberger wrote a sixty-nine-word paragraph for all
of the speakers to read. The paragraph uses common
words but contains almost all of the sounds used in
English. Here it is: "Please call Stella. Ask her to
bring these things with her from the store: Six
spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue
cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We
also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog
for the kids. She can scoop these things into three
red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the
train station."In nineteen ninety-nine, Professor
Weinberger put the recordings online. The Speech
Accent Archive is for anyone who wants to compare
and analyze the accents of different English
speakers.Some people think the archive would be
better if it included natural speech -- people
talking freely, not just reading the same words.
Professor Weinberger recognizes the strengths and
weaknesses of his site. "The biggest plus, of
course, is that it is so uniform that you can
immediately compare a Kiswahili speaker to a native
English speaker. But the downside is that a
less-than-skilled reader will have difficulties with
the paragraph that might not demonstrate their true
phonetic abilities."People often use sounds from
their first language until they can reproduce the
ones used in the language they are
learning.Professor Weinberger says the site gets a
million visits a month. "We get notices from speech
pathologists, from computational engineers who do
speech processing, from PhD students who want to do
research on bias and accent judgments, from actors
who need to learn a special part."The archive
contains more than one thousand five hundred
recordings. Professor Weinberger would like more
people to send in their own samples. There are about
six thousand languages in the world today. The
archive only has samples from about three hundred
fifty of them. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex
Villarreal.
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be useful for learning English.
Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
