A few years ago, a sharp, hardworking learner – terrified of his own accent – asked me to help him sound “more British”.
He’d watched videos. He’d practised his vowels. He was convinced that until he sounded like a newsreader from the BBC, . There were many like him. And there’ll be many more in the future.
As a child of a diaspora my relationship with English is already complicated. Add to that the fact that I grew up speaking it as a first language in a country where I was always considered inferior, it could be a minefield. So, I empathised with my learner’s anxiety.
After years of soul-searching and interrogation, I’ve learnt to own my relationship with English. I’ve learnt to see my first language as a communication tool I can use as I see fit. So, my response to learners who think they aren’t good enough is that they’re training for the wrong test.
Most of my learners will never live in London – or any other part of the world where English is spoken as a first language. They’ll sell software to a logistics company in Hamburg. They’ll join a Teams call with a project manager in São Paulo and a supplier in Hanoi. They’ll write emails to people who learned English in Lagos, in Manila, in Beijing.
The “native speaker” may not even be in the room. So, we shouldn’t be teaching as if they are. It’s time to retire the myth of “correct” English and replace it with something more useful: English as a tool for being understood, by anyone, anywhere.
The wrong target
For decades, teaching a language ran on a simple, unspoken assumption: there is one correct English – usually some flavour of British or American “Standard” English. And every other variety is a deviation from it. Accents were treated as flaws to sand down. A “th” that came out as a “d,” a rolled R, a flattened vowel – these were marked wrong, even when nobody actually misunderstood the sentence.
But the inconvenient statistic that we ignore – and which should reshape how we teach – is that the vast majority of English conversations happening anywhere in the world right now don’t include a “native speaker” at all. A Korean buyer and a Dutch supplier negotiate a shipping contract in English. A Saudi doctor consults with a Filipino nurse in English. None of them are reaching for an Oxford accent. They’re reaching for clarity.
This is the difference between correctness and intelligibility – and it’s the most important shift I’ve made in my own teaching.
- Correctness asks: does this match a native-speaker norm?
- Intelligibility asks: did the listener understand what I meant?
These are not the same question, and chasing the first one often gets in the way of the second. A learner who spends hours trying to eliminate every trace of their accent is spending time on something that has very little to do with whether they’ll be understood. Meanwhile, the skills that truly nurture successful communication – clear stress on key words, manageable speech rate, the ability to repair a misunderstanding gracefully – get almost no classroom time at all.
I’m not making an argument for sloppiness. Clarity still matters still matters. I am making an argument for aiming at the right target. My job isn’t to manufacture “native speakers”. It’s to produce confident communicators who can be understood by – and can understand – the extraordinary range of English speakers they’ll encounter in the real world.
Hear the message, not the accent
Once I’d made this shift in my own thinking, I needed to bring my learners along with me – and the way to do that was through an experience.
I do this through a “decode the message” session. I get my learners to listen to 4 (2-4 minute audio clips) of people who speak English as an additional language.
- A German CEO giving a product update in an earnings call
- A Brazilian engineer explaining a technical issue on a conference panel
- An Indian tech-support representative walking a customer through a fix
- A Japanese researcher presenting findings at an academic conference
Before playing anything, I provide learners with explicit instructions: “Your job is not to judge how these people sound. Your job is to figure out what they’re saying. If you catch yourself thinking ‘that pronunciation is unusual’, just note it and move on – that’s not the task.”
This framing matters because, without it, old habits take over and learners slip back into accent-grading.
On the first listen of the audio, I get leaners to answer one simple question: What is this person’s main point, in one sentence? No notes on pronunciation. No transcription. Just one sentence.
On the second listen, I get them to extract the detail – they have to complete a short task related to the content. For example, with the tech-support clip: “List the three steps the rep tells the customer to follow.” This forces active listening for information, not passive listening for “errors”.
In the debrief we discuss what they heard. I ask:
- “Did you understand the message, even when the accent was unfamiliar at first?”
- “What helped you understand – even when individual sounds were different from what you expected?” (It usually involves context, stress on key words, repetition, gesture, and pace issues.)
- “Now imagine: which of these four people are you most likely to actually work with one day?”
The goal is to get learners to realise that the “neutral” accent (usually meaning UK or US accent) they’ve been chasing is the one they’re least likely to need.
Graceful recovery
Listening comprehension is half the toolkit. The other half is what learners do when communication breaks down – because in real multilingual settings, it will. And that’s fine. The goal isn’t to prevent every misunderstanding; it’s to recover from them smoothly, without embarrassment on either side.
I teach a small set of clarification phrases early and drill them until they’re automatic. A few of my favourites are:
- “Could you say that another way?” – Better than “What?” or silence. It puts the work of repair on the message, not the person.
- “Let me rephrase that.” – Gives the speaker a graceful way to self-correct without losing face.
- “To confirm, you mean…?” – Turns a guess into a checkable fact, and shows active listening.
- “Sorry, could you slow down a little?” – A direct, low-stakes request that almost universally gets a positive response.
- “Just to make sure I’ve got this right…” – A softer version of confirming, useful before big decisions.
What makes these phrases powerful is that they’re accent-neutral and status-neutral. They work whether you’re speaking to a CEO or a classmate, whether the person you’re speaking with has a strong accent or none at all.
They shift the classroom culture away from “don’t make mistakes” and toward “communication is a two-way repair process” – which is a far more accurate description of how English actually functions in the world.
The real world
None of this means pronunciation instruction disappears from my classroom. I still teach word stress, sentence rhythm, and sounds that genuinely block understanding when mispronounced. But the target has changed. I’m not training learners toward an accent. I’m training them toward competence in a multilingual world – the actual arena where they’ll use this language for the rest of their lives.
The old model treated my Brazilian learner’s accent, or my Korean learner’s rhythm, as a problem to be fixed. The new model treats it as one variety among thousands, equally valid, equally capable of getting the job done – as long as the message gets through.
That’s the real world. That’s what I’m preparing them for.
