Ever heard of bidialectalism? It means the ability to fluently switch between two dialects.
It was a new word for me when I first started teaching in the U.S.—but I figured it out fast, just by opening my mouth in the classroom.
Bringing my own Australian dialect to teaching six-year-olds deepened my capacity to help struggling readers and multilingual readers. It has also strengthened our classroom community and provided surprising, even amusing opportunities to learn—for all of us.
“What if they get an Australian accent?”
When I first entered an American classroom, I was nervous about teaching phonemes to kids. I kept wondering, “What if they get an Australian accent?” (That never happened.)
I remember my first year teaching Amplify CKLA, standing in front of my students and trying to figure out why the word “from” seemed tricky. For me, it sounded exactly how it was spelled. I kept saying “from,” but my students said: “/f/ /r/ /u/ /m/.”
That was the first of many times I realized how different my dialect really was.
The next one came during our Animals and Habitats unit. We were deep into the lesson when I casually said what sounded like “Pythin,” and a student turned and said, “Don’t you mean PythOn?”
Then came the r-controlled vowels. (R-controlled vowels, also called r-influenced vowels, are vowels that change their sound when followed by an “r” in the same syllable. Instead of sounding short or long, the vowel is “controlled” by the “r”—like in “car,” “bird,” “corn,” “turn,” and “her.”)
Because of my accent, when I said those sounds, they almost always came out as “uh.” (I think that’s why I’ve been told Aussies were responsible for the schwa!) While that got a good laugh—and gave students lots of chances to mimic my accent—it drove home the real importance of phonological awareness.
Learning together: Teaching phonemes and pronunciation
I spent the rest of that first year going over the phoneme videos on the Amplify resources hub, practicing my r-controlled vowels. I did my best to learn to switch between the Australian and American dialects. I even started challenging my students to correct me more often. (“Wait, did I say that right?”)
That led to more intentional practice when teaching grade-level spelling patterns for those individual sounds. I started adding silly actions to go with each one. For example, we’d say, “‘e’ and ‘r’ are friends and together they go ‘errrrr,’” and we’d pretend to turn a key into either side of our cheeks.
Those small quirks helped my students remember the sounds—and they helped me just as much.
Don’t dread it—use it!
So, to any teacher who’s dreading teaching phonemes or teaching kids to read because of their speech or dialect—don’t!
Learning with your students, blending Amplify’s tools with your own quirks and personality, builds classroom memories and creates powerful literacy instruction.
You don’t have to erase your accent to be effective. In fact, embracing your uniqueness might just make you a better teacher.
From one teacher to another: Don’t be afraid of the greatness you already have.
To close out, here’s my favorite use of what I believe is the greatest phoneme/diphthong of all time: Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!