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2 ""nglish as a foreign language 
because of fatigue: the listener runs out of the energy necessary 
to absorb and interpret the strange sounds. 
2. 7 Understanding different accents 
Many foreign-language learners who are used to the accent of 
their own teacher are surprised and dismayed when they find 
they have difficulty understanding someone else. Some of them 
try to get over this at first by claiming that the second speaker's 
accent is somehow inferior or 'wrong'. But strictly speaking 
there is rarely such a thing as a 'wrong' accent: there are simply 
accents that are more or less difficult to understand - that is, 
broadly speaking, ones that are more or less removed from the 
original variety learned. We must remember also that the 
English many of our students will need to understand may very 
well not be spoken in a native accent at all. Today, two people 
who do not speak each other's language will very often use 
English as the instrument of communication: pilots communi­
cating with ground control, for example, diplomats negotiating, 
businessmen making deals, or anyone at all concerned with the 
tourist industry ... and only a minority of these may be native 
speakers. Hence, even if we could teach all the 'native' accents 
there are, this would not satisfy many learners' needs. What we 
can do is try to give them a reasonable familiarity with the two 
most useful English accents - that is to say, the British and 
American standard varieties- and then perhaps let them have a 
taste of some others simply to open their eyes to the possibilities 
and give them some practice in coping with them. Learners who 
have some experience in listening to and understanding a 
number of different accents are more likely to be able to cope 
successfully with further ones than those who have only heard 
one or two. 
2.8 Using visual and aural environmental clues 
Many foreign-language learners seem to lack the ability to use 
environmental clues to get at the meaning of an imperfectly 
grasped phrase: time and again I have come across instances of 
students who have misunderstood something because they are 
analysing words in isolation and not linking them to the context 
or accompanying visual stimuli. They may, for example, under­
stand 'horse' for 'house' in spite of an illustrating picture, or sit 
down when I say 'come here' in spite of a gesture of invitation. 
I and aural environmental clues 
What is the problem? There is certainly no question of the 
students being unable to perceive and interpret visual or other 
stimuli as such- they do so perfectly well in their own language. 
Thus I see no value in practising this skill in isolation: exercises 
such as listening to a conversation in order to discover how 
many participants there are, or watching a film extract and 
describing the emotions or relationships of the actors - these 
may be fun, and the intellectual student may enjoy analysing 
how he comes to his conclusions, but they do not improve his 
ability to understand foreign discourse in context. 
For the problem is not the lack of skill in perceiving and 
interpreting extra-linguistic clues, but the ability to apply it 
when listening to the foreign language. And the reason why the 
foreign-language learner has difficulty here would seem to be 
because his receptive system is overloaded. He has to work 
much harder at decoding than the native listener and, as 
described on pp. 14-r 5, tries to interpret every detail as it comes 
up instead of relaxing and taking a broader view. He simply 
does not have the time and attention to spare for absorbing 
information beyond the actual semantic significance of the 
words themselves. 
These difficulties will not be overcome simply by drawing the 
learner's attention to the presence and importance of environ­
mental clues; on the contrary, such action is liable merely to 
increase the number of details he feels he has to take in, and 
make him even more strained and frustrated. What we need to 
do is encourage him to relax, gather what he can from the 
information he can readily decode, and use his common sense 
and the discourse skills he carries over from his native language 
to help him understand the whole. Exercises aimed at training 
students to skim for specific information, to ignore details and 
gather general import, to cope with redundancy and 'noise', and 
to listen for recreation and pleasure (see Part 2) - all these 
encourage a relaxed, holistic approach to the understanding of 
heard discourse and may therefore provide the best means of 
helping to free the foreign listener to perceive and exploit all 
available clues to meaning.