Wonderwall

The other day, I used Wonderwall by Oasis with one of my classes, as music is generally a good way to get them talking without realising it. One of the follow-up activities was to get the students to read out some of the lines for pronunciation practice.

"And affter all, you're my wonderwall," one of them read.

"That's good," I replied, "You just need to think about that first vowel in 'after'. It's 'ah-fter', remember, like the vowel in 'aunt' that we practiced before?"

"Affter."

"Not quite - listen again. Ah-fter. Can you say that? Ah-fter."

"No, 'e said affter in ze song."

The student was so determined that she was right on this one that she made me play that section of the song again, grinning triumphantly when Liam Gallagher did, of course, sing 'affter'. And what could I do? I explained that he spoke a Northern dialect which does in fact use the short 'a', as well as dropping 'h's, which I'm always telling them off for doing. I explained that I spoke Standard English with at least the remnants of an RP accent*, and that was the dialect usually taught to foreign speakers of English. However, I couldn't actually tell them that what they were saying was wrong. Damn you, Liam Gallagher.

The UK has an amazingly high number of dialects - far more than most European countries, I'd wager, especially given its size. In France, there's only really Parisian, Breton, Ch'ti, Southern and Tours (the latter being generally accepted as the 'best' French) - there are more than that between Birmingham and Edinburgh alone. This makes life pretty difficult for teaching English because the majority of people don't have the standard accent; I do wonder how the Scottish and Mancunian assistants nearby get on. Should they try to change their accent for teaching purposes in order to avoid confusion, or just speak normally and acknowledge that they have a different but equally valid way of speaking?

Most of the time, it doesn't matter too much as I only really insist on certain aspects of pronunciation, such as 'h', 'th' (instead of 's' or 'z') and stress. I only picked on that particular vowel because it was a common mistake: my students tend to blend a lot of vowels together so that (because of the dropped 'h'), the words: 'hut', 'hat', 'hot', 'out' and 'ate' are pronounced almost identically - something a bit like 'put' but without the 'p'. Still, I've learnt my lesson and will never use Oasis for pronunciation exercises again. I can only thank my lucky stars I didn't use that song where they manage to somehow fit four syllables into the word 'sunshine'.


* Which moving to Suffolk, going to university, and dating a Northerner have begun to kill off.