WMU should establish an American Accent Learning Center

An accent can be a marker of race, showing one’s identity, mentality, ideology, culture, and ethnicity.

Hassan Al-Momani

It can also be the reason for discrimination and racism when it reflects a cultural identity which is different from the mainstream culture.

Additionally, accents may portray stereotypes about certain groups in a society.
Thus, the accent reflects the cultural identity of immigrant groups because it’s based on cultural backgrounds of the immigrants’ personalities.

This point is very important in clarifying the cultural clash from which some immigrants suffer, in which they are unable to transcend their roots, language and heritage to conform in a new environment.

Cultural identity, which is defined as the feeling of identity of a group or a culture, is a very important issue in the relationship between language and immigration in some countries. This is due to conditions that immigrants suffer from including discrimination, racism and loss of homeland.

These feelings may lead them to confusion resulting from the feeling of looking different from the majority, the pain of prejudice and intolerance, and the frustration and ordinary pressure to act cool and fit in, in the society. All these conditions may lead to a bicultural identity crisis, in which most immigrants find themselves because of the conflict of belonging to two cultures, without falling apart in the process.

Cognitively, the cultural clash is a result of two cultures represented in one’s cognition, in which it is hard to incorporate the two without facing the problem of clashing.

This is due to the notion of culture, which can be defined as the socially shared knowledge in a human’s cognition. Some immigrants fail to find this socially shared knowledge and they don’t know to which culture they have to belong.

The bicultural conflict most immigrants have is due to a sense of new culture and a lack of the sense of their origin, the lack of the cultural bondage and the disability to bring both the new and the old into one cultural mold.

The conflict from which many immigrants suffer is both a cultural and ideological one.

The bicultural identity crisis from which most immigrants suffer is due to their inability to be native speakers of the new language, which can lead them to feel like outsiders in society.

At Western Michigan University, we have a lot of international students who have this feeling. Some feel they are misunderstood by native English speakers on the basis of their accent, which can be hard to understand.
This problem can be solved by establishing a center of American Accent Learning, which will help international students learn how to speak the American accent so they can be easily understood by native students.

Thus the cultural gap will be narrowed by designing special courses to teach international students how to communicate with Americans in their accent while still holding onto their native origins.

Hassan Al-Momani, a Western Herald opinion columnist, is a graduate student majoring in English and can be reached via e-mail at hassan76us@yahoo.com.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=3675

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Feb 3 2009. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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