Foreign Accent

A couple funny school stories:

In a sixieme class we were doing repetitions of a verb conjugation with these pronoun flashcards I made. For example: with verb “to go”, I hold up “we”, they say, “we go”, etc. I was doing it as a little competition and one kid was going. He messed up on “he”, so I made a buzzer sound, but all the kids thought I was correcting his pronunciation, that “he” was pronounced “eeeeee” (think game show buzzer). So then they started conjugating the verbs with “eeee” instead of he. It was so funny. The more I tried to suppress my laughter and get myself under control, the more I laughed. The kids thought it was pretty funny, but thankfully they’ve forgotten about it and don’t continue to make fun of me for it.

Funny story #2: We’re doing “have got” in sixieme now, as in “ I have got six notebooks.” We did the negative a few days ago and I noticed that the kids were writing “I have nat gat…” instead of “not got.” I realized it was because of my midwestern accent! I explained to them that the different regions of the US, people have different accents and that even though it sounded like I was saying “nat gat” it was really “not got”. I didn’t catch it during pronunciation drills because it sounded just like I was saying it. It didn’t even occur to me until I saw their exercises. Haha. Hopefully their English careers won’t be forever marred by a midwestern accent.