AIBU to feedback to school about teachers use of glottal stops

[TalomaPaith]

Children at Dcs school are split into different groups for phonics.

Parents are sometimes invited to watch lessons. I observed a lesson by a teacher using glottal stops I.e Let'er instead of letter.

Would IBU to mention this?

She said the teacher's French pronunciation is so poor that she is completely baffled how she ever qualified to teach it.

@User5306921 I don't recall any test of my MFL pronunciation when I trained. Tbf teacher training does not focus on (nor teach) the subject to be taught as a rule. MFL teachers are in short supply, sadly. Even when I trained (many years ago) the colleagues I trained with were mostly picking up their second MFL from scratch (I actually had two to a decent level but I was the only one, tho obvs a German native speaker was better at German than I was).

All that said, it's poor that the teacher’s French is so weak and that class sounds as tho it is being failed. They need to get your friend in as an assistante.

@mindutopia "date of bird" made me laugh, sorry! but actually that's appalling.

My friends daughter was livid when her year through streak of 10/10 in the weekly spelling test was broken when she got 9/10, losing a mark for spelling ‘clothes’, ‘cloves’. The teacher pronounced ‘clothes’ as ‘cloves’. Her mother asked her what possessed her to write a word that hadn’t been in the list of words to learn. The daughter said she spelt the words she was told to write down.

Wow. This is an ignorant thing to think and an appalling thing to say.

The Sutton Trust have done some great research on this, but I guess you’ve already made your mind up www.suttontrust.com/our-research/speaking-up-accents-social-mobility/

I was taught to speak French with a fairly decent accent.

When I tried to teach French to kids in SE England they looked at me as if I had two heads.

They said things like "Oovrai la pawte" so I ended up having to say things in a faux accent so they could understand me..

Appalling. My daughter’s psychology teacher used to say ‘Fred’ instead of ‘thread’ which got really confusing in a lesson about Fred and Rose West. My daughter referred to her teacher as a ‘thucking idiot’!

Do people care about their children learning to speak, read and write correctly? Yes, some people do.

I live in Hampshire and all the deep rooted locals (DHs family included) have a cross between a cockney accent and a west country ‘farmer’ accent. So when op says south east…

😆🤣🤣

Something like that could be a genuine lisp though. Not really necessary to take the P out of people for stuff like that. My brother was incredibly lispy and illegible to even some family members as a kid and it was really hard for him. Luckily he managed to get some speech therapy.

The ones from Cornwall 🤣🤣🤣?? Also from that region and I wondered about the Scottish comment but I do know people who commonly drop their Ts, my kids have an occasional shot at it and are soon set right but I probably agree we're not the worst for it

No I don’t think it was. Just sloppy speech.

Did you mean illegible?

No I don’t think it was. Just sloppy speech.

Did you mean illegible?

No I don’t think it was. Just sloppy speech.

Did you mean illegible?

No I don’t think it was. Just sloppy speech.

Did you mean illegible?

I do all of the above and really don’t think I can hear the difference. This comes up a lot on here and when I say thread and Fred, they sound the same and I struggle to understand the difference. I don’t hear it when others speak either.

A person who doubts intelligence based on accent leaves no room for doubt about theirs.

Clothes and cloves are 100% the same to me. It’s boggling my mind trying to make them sound different. Luckily nobody else is awake because I must sound crazy sitting here repeating cloves/clothes

You could mention it OP but you'd sound like a complete bellend.

I observed a mother on a train recently correcting her child after they used a glottal stop. She followed the correction with a half arsed whisper of you'll sound terribly common if you carry on doing that - which I of course assume is your worry also.

I witnessed two nearby passengers pull a face and one physically facepalm at how much of a bellend she was.

Are you dyslexic?

Tell me you don’t understand linguistics without telling me you don’t understand linguistics.

Yes, you’d be colossally unreasonable to complain about teachers’ accents, of which glottal stops are an element. It would be like complaining about a teacher pronouncing ‘grass’ with a short A (or indeed a long one).

It would also make you look very ignorant, which I suspect is the opposite of what you want to achieve.

Absolutely this.

OP I mean this kindly (as an ex-Biggest Pendant in the World) but just let it go. How much time does your DC spend with this teacher? Just explain about accents - surely you must be aware you can’t police every interaction your child has while they’re growing up? If it’s this important to you, model the speech/accent you prefer at home but don’t kid yourself you can have complete control. There will be bigger things to stress about in time, believe me.

I'm very well versed in linguistics and take a prescriptive view when teaching. Why set children up for failure in the one place that is meant to educate them? Then they have the cheek to talk about excellence etc

This would bother me too OP. Whether I’d have the balls to bring it up with the school is another matter.

I think phonics are done in the accent of the person teaching them. But you still get giraffes with scarves type scenarios where the presumption of rhyming just doesn't hold and then it sounds weird.