Roger Anderson, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

One of the many challenges international teaching assistants (ITAs) face when leading undergraduate learning spaces on American campuses is to produce speech that is intelligible and comprehensible for their learners. Undoubtedly, intelligibility and comprehensibility are co-constructed between a speaker and their interlocutors, and are therefore socially mediated. Moreover, an audience’s acceptance and ability to understand accents is mutable. Because of the intimate nature of oral communication, these constructs can be all the more emotionally charged for learners, a fact to which prudent instructors and programs remain sensitive. To this end, humor can be used in the ITA classroom to direct learners’ attention to important aspects of comprehensible communication while remaining attentive to the intimate nature of a learner’s developing speaking proficiencies.

Pronunciation of specific segmentals remains one of the important components of an ITA’s overall intelligibility and comprehensibility (Isaacs & Trofimovich, 2012). Within my own ITA Training Program, learners’ pronunciation of the particular segmental the rhotic (pronunciation of the /r/ sound before consonants) has proven salient for ratings of their comprehensibility, and at the same time has proven challenging for ITAs to acquire. This article proposes a humorous activity to develop ITAs’ receptive skills pursuant to developing productive skills of the rhotic accent.

It is believed that building these receptive skills will advance ITA learners’ bidialectal abilities, meaning their abilities to speak an additional variety of English rather than “fixing” the variety of English they already speak. Embedded in this view is the recognition of the existence and legitimacy of World Englishes, or the plurality of varieties of spoken English (Kachru, 2008). On the socioemotional plane, it is believed that exposing ITAs to the bidialectalism of the famous American actors featured in these clips will deepen their appreciation of bidialectalism, hopefully encouraging them to adopt it as a goal for themselves beyond their own bilingual proficiencies.

The activity proposed here makes use of video clips that are widely available and free of charge (at the time of this publication).

Materials: Three Video Clips

The idiosyncratic accent of Boston natives features unique vocabulary and is well known for its most identifiable feature, its nonrhoticity. The Boston accent is but one of North America’s many dialects of English, which are constantly shifting and evolving (Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, 2020).

The proposed classroom activity utilizes three separate video clips available from YouTube. The first is a televised commercial for an automotive company that appeared during the 2020 Super Bowl. It features three well-known American actors, all of whom originate from the city of Boston and its surrounding areas. Specifically, the three actors are John Krasinski (known for the television series The Office and the movie A Quiet Place), Chris Evans (known as Captain America in Marvel films), and Rachael Dratch (known for the television series Saturday Night Live). The product being advertised is of little interest for this activity, but the language used is of paramount importance. The clip ends humorously, with the appearance of an adopted son of Boston, baseball star David “Big Papi” Ortiz. A native of the Dominican Republic, Ortiz has been the subject of ongoing jokes on Saturday Night Live for his Spanish-inflected English. In the car commercial, titled “Smaht Pahk | 2020 Hyundai Sonata | Hyundai,” Ortiz utters only one expression, but in a characteristically Bostonian accent.

The second video clip is a celebrity interview that appeared on American late night television. It features one of the actors from the Hyundai car commercial, John Krasinski. He is being interviewed by late night talk show host Stephen Colbert, who is originally from South Carolina. The clip, “John Krasinski Teaches Stephen Colbert How to Do a Proper Boston Accent,” references Krasinski’s car commercial, which prompts the host to ask for lessons on speaking the Bostonian accent. In doing so, Krasinski demonstrates his bidialectalism. In turn, Colbert gives Krasinski a lesson on speaking like a Southerner, drawing from his native South Carolinian dialect of English. Together, both men demonstrate their abilities to switch into their native accents, which are markedly different from the accents they habitually use on television and in film.

The third and final clip, “Emily Blunt's Kids Are Picking Up Their Dad's American Accent,” features another celebrity interview between late night host Jimmy Fallon and the British actress Emily Blunt (known for the films Mary Poppins and Girl on a Train). Blunt is the real-life wife of John Krasinski, with whom she has two daughters. In this clip, Fallon inquires about the accents of their daughters. Blunt responds, in her markedly British accent, that her daughter used to speak with a British accent, but is now adopting the accent of her American father, which is evident through her use of the word water. Blunt’s light-hearted dismissal of the American accent demonstrates the playful relationship between speakers of American English and received pronunciation.

Intended Outcomes

This section overviews the goals targeted through this classroom activity. The goals of this activity are to:

1. demonstrate the variety of productions of the allophones of /r/, and consequently, demonstrate the legitimacy of language variation;
2. allow learners to experience the difficulty of understanding unfamiliar speech productions of certain letters—here, nonrhoticity in particular—and connect this difficulty to teaching in undergraduate classrooms;
3. recognize the bidialectal abilities of Krasinski and Colbert; and
4. gain an awareness of both the possibility and prudence of cultivating bidialectalism as a linguistic goal for themselves during the course of the ITA training class/during their time as ITAs.

Activity: Comprehension Check of Bostonian English

This section lays out the suggested process of implementing the activity within the class.

1. During class, the instructor plays the video clip of the car commercial, but without any subtitles/closed captions.
2. After watching, the instructor asks ITAs what percentage of the dialogue they understood. The instructor then asks for individual words that were spoken.
3. Next, if the variation in the /r/ was not identified by the ITAs, the instructor explicates the difference, pointing out the words “smaht pahk,” signifying “smart park.”
4. The instructor asks learners to review the video, but this time with captioning turned on. After doing so, the instructor repeats the posed questions of comprehension. The instructor can explicate the salience of the phoneme /r/ following a vowel sound to intelligibility and comprehensibility. If applicable, the instructor can invite learners to consider individualized feedback on their own speech production that addressed this issue, and provide some examples of such instances.
5. If unidentified by the learners, the instructor can point out David Ortiz’s appearance and the intended humor of his inclusion in the commercial, a Dominican man’s use of the Boston accent.
6. Additional conversation could take place before showing the second clip, Colbert’s interview with Krasinski. Differences can be pointed out between the Southern and Boston accents each man performs in contradistinction to the speech they use when not code-switching into their native dialects.
7. Finally, the third clip, Fallon’s interview with Emily Blunt, could be viewed. These clips can be used to spark conversation about language ideologies and “standard varieties” of a language, of Americans’ ever-evolving acceptance of language variety (and growing familiarity with British accents), of the variations within ITAs’ own cultures, and so on.

Observed Outcomes

Having implemented the first part of this lesson in my own ITA classroom (the car commercial), I made the following observations.

First, as soon as I opened the commercial clip, an ITA exclaimed, “Captain America!” referencing the actor Chris Evans. This exclamation indicated that one of the actors in the car commercial was recognized for his most famous film role, in which he used non-Bostonian-accented English. In this way, the actor’s use of Bostonian-accented English within the commercial then constituted a novel representation of this actor to the learner. Second, a few of the students had already seen the commercial. This posed no problem to the lesson.

Third, students found it rather difficult to understand the spoken English. The visible title of the video, “Smaht Pahk,” helped clue them in as to the linguistic variation being here emphasized, yet reported scores of their understanding were low. Fourth, inquiries and interesting discussions did ensue, asking about my perception if most Americans can understand this clip, about Americans’ abilities to understand different dialects, and about their experiences with “standard” English.

As for actually facilitating linguistic change, I cannot at this time report any observed changes. This was due to my own limitations of time and energy, which were then interrupted by the arrival of COVID-19 to campus. I invite other ITA professionals to use these materials, to report their observations, and offer further insights from practice.

Other Useful Video Clips on the Boston Accent and Related Language Variation

• Seth Meyers’ fake film trailer: Boston Accent Trailer - Late Night with Seth Meyers” (featuring actress Rachael Dratch) (disclaimer: contains a few scenes imitating gun violence)
• Mark Wahlberg (Boston native, imitating his Boston-accent using mother) interviewed by Stephen Colbert: “Mark Wahlberg Has Heard Worse Than Your Bad Boston Accent”
• David “Big Papi” Ortiz interview on CNBC, talking life and business after baseball: “David 'Big Papi' Ortiz Talks Life And Business After Baseball | Squawk Box | CNBC”
• Rachel Dratch accent-coaching David “Big Papi” Ortiz: “Dialect Coach | Hyundai”
• Keenan Thompson’s impression of David “Big Papi” Ortiz on Saturday Night Live: “Weekend Update: David Ortiz's Post-Retirement Plans – SNL” (disclaimer: contains a joke about human anatomy)

References

Isaacs, T., & Trofimovich, P. (2012). Deconstructing comprehensibility. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 34(3), 475–505. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263112000150

Kachru, B. B. (2008). The first step: the Smith paradigm for intelligibility in world Englishes. World Englishes, 27(3/4).

Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania. (2020). TELSUR project: Atlas of North American English. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html