"Accent your positive and delete your negative" Donna Karan

Accents and pronunciation can make or break communication in any language. What happens to you when speaking another language and you mispronounce something? Many times you cannot be understood, which can lead to you feeling self conscious or embarrassed. For our students, pronunciation is the key to success (at least in my opinion).
Here's an activity you can try with higher levels is:

1. Brainstorm different accents around the world.
2. Discuss the differences beween them - see how much your students know (or don't)
3. Next you could do one of two things:

• Show the video below and see how many of the 21 accents the students can hear OR
• go to www.voxopop.com and get some peers to record a 2 second piece (for example everyone say "Good morning, today it's sunny").
• After listening and brainstorming ideas the students could then record their answers onto voxopop, saying something like; "speaker one, we think you are from Australia".
• After, ask you colleagues to go back to voxopop and reply to the students, saying something like "Hi, I'm Anna, speaker one and I'm from Canada".

After listening, and comparing their answers, to the reality the class can then focus on the different intonations and stresses of different accents.

Benefits of this? Well, in real life the learners are going to be exposed to lots of different types of English and they should be aware of different accents. For higher levels, this is always a factor impeding learning.