Week 3, Part 2: Why Chinese ELLs Have an Accent

After seeing the representation of Chinese people in my surveying, I decided that Chinese, and more specifically Mandarin, would definitely be one of the languages I study. So, I decided to jump start my research in the Chinese language and read a few articles and papers from linguists and ESL educators about teaching ESL specifically to Chinese people. Turns out, a lot of people have written about their experiences teaching ESL to Chinese immigrants.

My first reading was of an article called "From the Classroom: Working with Chinese ELLs" written by Xiaolin Yin-Croft, a third grade ESL teacher at Ulloa Elementary School in San Francisco. Here are some of her observations on pronunciation as an ELL teacher:

--Pronunciations are represented by symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for the sake of being as accurate as possible. Many English courses in China use to help with pronunciation and I've even learnt it myself attending an English class as a guest. A chart for IPA phonemes (units of sound in language) in English is shown below. However, I've also included pronunciation that I believe most Americans would be able to piece together without much discrepancy.*--

Chinese is a monosyllabic language, so each character or word has only one syllable and is clearly pronounced because most characters begin with a consonant and end with a vowel sound.** On the other hand, English words have many syllables and sentences are pronounced with a different flow, making it harder to speak English with the same flow:

• each syllable in English words may be emphasized more than usual, making them sound choppy

• vowel sounds may be added after some consonants to make consonant clusters like /cl/ and /pl/ ("clay" and "play") and in words with consonants sounds one after another like in "backward"

There are also many pronunciation challenges because many sounds used in English don't exist in Mandarin.

• /v/ in "very" is often pronounced like /w/ in "wary"

• /ð/ in "they" is often pronounced like /z/ or /s/ in "zebra" or "sorry"

• consonant clusters like /tr/, /dr/, /st/, /pl/ in "try," "dry," "stop," and "play" don't exist in Mandarin and may be hard to pronounce

The above statements presented by Mrs. Yin-Croft I can definitely attest to, as I've heard my own family and friends experience those problems. Here are some of my personal experiences:

The word that Chinese ELLs can never pronounce (from my observations): CLAIRE

In IPA, American English "Claire" is pronounced: /kleə/ (clair). Meanwhile, most of the Chinese people I've met pronounce it: /kʌlaɪɜ:ʳ/ (cuh-liar).

Another anecdote, my parents own a window manufacturing business. My mother once called a customer saying: "Please come to my home at 7PM [to pick up the windows]." However, because of her Chinese accent, this is what the customer heard: "Police come to my home at 7PM." Because of my mother's accent, she added a slight vowel sound in the /pl/ from "please" and her emphasis on the long e sound, the word sounded more like /pʌ'li:s/ (puh-leece) rather than /pli:z/ (pleez). For some reason, the customer came at 7PM anyway and asked my mom first thing: "Where's the police?"

*In the beginning, I wrote "American" pronunciations myself, but I realized later that my perspective on letters and sounds are different from that of Americans who don't know the pinyin system in Mandarin (a phonetic system used in China to "spell out" Chinese characters using letters from the Roman alphabet) because I kept using pinyin in my transcriptions. Phonemes in pinyin are not quite the same as those in English because there is a large variety of pronunciations that are different or even absent in English, so a non-Chinese American might not read the letters the same way I do. For example, "lai" in pinyin is pronounced "lie" but most Americans would read it "lay." So, to solve the problem I asked my dear Paki friend Zahra to write out the pronunciations for me.

*As a fluent Mandarin speaker, I never noticed a difference in flow of words until I listened to Chinese pop and hip hop music, whose lyrics I thought seemed very choppy.