"Your accent is the soul of your speech"

Today is the 22nd of September, 2020. And it is important to say the date because our class has begun with this topic, unexpectedly. I found it really interesting because so many teachers normally obviate or do not give enough attention to this kind of thing, I don't know if it is because they assume is something everyone should know or because they do not find it enough important to give a time in class. But, as a student view, I really appreciate stopping at some point and work on some things, "apparently" easy, because it gives us a lot of clues of how he is doing things, in this case, pronunciation, or how we can improve it. As a teacher, you need to have a lot of resources to extend your knowledge beginning with taking advantage of something unexpected that can happen in class.

Anyway, we dedicate one hour to compare different types of accents, answer the question of which one is better (if there are any bad ones), which make more grammar mistakes, etc. And all this happened because of how a classmate pronounced the date. So, I tried by myself, and here is the result:

• South Africa: Its English-speaking population is 16.424.417 of which 4.930.510 are native. The rest has English as a second language.

• Brasil: Its English-speaking population is 10.542.000 of which 292.000 are native.

• Russia: Its English-speaking population is 7.574.305 os which 2522 are native. 

• United States: Its English-speaking population is 283.160.411 of which 234.171.556 are native. 

• United Kingdom: Its English-speaking population is 59.000.000 of which 54.400.000 are native.

As a personal note, I have to say I do not have a specific accent, because I have learned English by hearing movies, songs, videos, etc. So I have a kind of mix in my brain. But, I have tried my best to imitate the British accent. But, as I learned today, different accents are good, because it means the language it's alive. 

Also, a question that appeared during this part of the class was "How many people talk English as a second language rather than native?" I answered by intuition that there must be more people that talk English as a second language just because right now it is the universal language worldwide (EIL, English as an International Language), so more people speak it by learning than by being native. It has more sense for me. An example can be Spain. Here, our private and public education system is mostly dominated by bilingual education, based on Spanish and English. So, just here, there are thousands of people learning and talking in English thanks to their education. If this wasn't possible, all these people would speak Spanish because is their mother tongue. But, that was not enough for me, so I did a little research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population), and here is what I found.

In those countries in which the first language is not English, their population available to speak English has the language as a second language, because their first one is the mother tongue that dominates the country. In numbers, here are some examples:

Instead, in those countries where English is the first language, the numbers are completely different:

So, in a global mean, there are more people that have English as a Second Language rather than native. 

Right after this, we continued with we left last class: The three main theories of acquiring languages. The most important thing I want to highlight today is the mechanism of innate theory.

It happens from an input, which is the primary linguistic information a baby has, normally the adult speech he/she hear every single day. Once this happened, the LAD starts working on and the General Language Learning principle adds to the grammatical knowledge (the rules of the language) begin to structure the speech they are hearing, and creating some kind of mental structure that make the babies understand (or at least, create a general idea of what is going on). After this, the baby will start with the output, his/her own speech. This is no necessarily happen when the baby has a base of vocabulary or grammar, he/she can start with random noises that have a meaning for them. 

 INPUT ➡️ LAD ➡️ OUTPUT

So many things for just one class, right? 

See you tomorrow with the next summary of the day.