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Teach English in Hanyang Zhen - Ankang Shi

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I was lucky enough, during my years as a student, to have had English teachers from all over the world: a couple of Italians, several coming from Great Britain, two from America and one from Australia. Thanks to this, I have had the opportunity to become familiar with different accents and slangs. I don't think a non-native English speaker gets to choose which accent he/she wants to use – unless certain circumstances force him/her to act in a specific way. In my case, for example, the American accent was not imposed by anyone. It simply feels more natural to me, as I speak – and, to be honest, when I try to speak with a British accent, it sounds like a total disaster. I can nevertheless understand British English and I have always found it very challenging to discover the differences and similarities between the different types of English all over the world. In particular, I am very intrigued by the differences between British and American English, as these are the two typologies of English I was exposed to for most of my life. The very first differences I have come into contact with were certain substantives. It would be impossible and useless for me to list them all here, but some examples might be: "fall" vs "autumn", "eraser" vs "rubber", "elevator" vs "lift", "cookie" vs "biscuit", "apartment" vs "flat", etc. When I was in middle school, then, I began to wonder why words such as "theater" and "theatre", or "color" and "colour", or "program" and "programme", or "defense" and "defence", or "organization" and "organisation", were considered both correct, despite the fact that they were written in a different way. About grammar rules, it was a little more difficult. As a matter of fact, my English teacher in high school was an Italian woman who had spent half of her life in the United States. Therefore, her English was of the American type, but she used to utilize a British English textbook for her lessons and, as a consequence, she used to teach us the British grammar. This fact has heavily influenced, of course, my way of speaking. For example, even though I am totally aware of the fact that the adverb "already" is usually followed by the simple past tense in American English, I pretty much often tend to use the present perfect tense. In contrast to this, though, I find it very natural to form sentences with the possessive verb "to have got" the American way – eg. "I have a dog." instead of "I have got a dog.", or "Do you have a brother?" instead of "Have you got a brother?". The same goes for collective nouns, such as "basketball team", for which I would always use the 3rd person singular of the verb – while in British English you can use the plural form as well. I rarely use the negative form "needn't" instead of "don't need to" or the auxiliary verb "shall" instead of "will". Before concluding, a quick excursus concerning the pronunciation issue. In American English, the letter /r/ rarely gets dropped, while in British English, there is a tendency to drop /r/ at the end of the word – eg. "four". In British English, /a/ is more open than in American English in words such as "organization", "pay". On the other hand, in American English /a/ is more open than in British English sometimes – eg. "law", "strawberry". We need to bear in mind, though, that in the first case, /a/ tends to become more of an open /e/ and, in the case of open /a/ it tends to become more of an open /o/. I would like to conclude by saying that, although sometimes I might feel a little confused when it comes to differentiate British from American English, I feel very lucky about the fact that I have been tutored by different teachers coming from different Countries. As I already mentioned at the beginning of the essay, I did not choose American English over British English because "I like it better". I am and I will always be interested in every variation of this language – from Jamaican, to Indian, to Southern African English – and I hope that I will have the opportunity in life to travel to these places or to get to know native speakers from Countries I haven't entered into contact with so far.


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