English Recordings

D: Hi, my name is Delphine, nice to meet you!

M: Hi Delphine, I’m Mike. Where are you from?

D: I come from France but I have been living in Switzerland for 7 years.
I live in Steffisburg, it’s near the Alps, in the South of Bern

M: Do you speak German?
D: I have been learning German since I arrived in Switzerland.
Now I would like to improve my spoken English!

M: Do you have family in Switzerland?
D: I am married to a Swiss, and we have two sons: two little boys. And a little girl is for soon! What about you?

M: I am single. I travel a lot for my job, I’m a journalist. And you, what do you do for a living?
D: I am a research assistant, I work at the University of Bern.

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Hello, everyone! My name is Alina. It is so nice to meet you. I am 26 years old and I'm an English teacher with TEFL certificate. I graduated from university with the bachelors degree in teaching English and linguistics. And I've been teaching English for 5 years now, teaching both children and adults, ranging in age from 5 to 35, both online and in person.
As a teacher I have coordinated after school clubs, summer and winter camps and daily lessons plans. And I constantly infuse music, dance and art into my lessons, and also games and physical activities.
Communication with kids brings me so energy and joy and actually teaching children is my passion. I love to inspire them and I like to be inspired by them. I think it is so much fun and I like to help them, you know, grow and be able to speak more fluently and also show them something new and interesting.
As for me, I am fun, friendly, kind, active, easy-going and encouraging person to everyone. I enjoy experiencing new cultures, learning new things, travelling and meeting new people.
I want to teach English in Vietnam because I've heard so many wonderful things and it seems like such an amazing place and there are so many things to see, so many things to learn and so many things to do.
Thank you very much for watching my video and I look forward to teaching in your school and teaching your kids. Thank you! Bye!

He was born in 1849 in Embleton, England and was educated at home by his father until he was 12 years old. When he was 14, he was an apprentice office boy in a merchants counting house. In 1870 he started to write for a provincial daily newspaper Northern Echo. The following year he was invited to become the Echo’s editor, which made him the youngest newspaper editor in the country. Soon after moving to London he founded his own journal and became a prominent name in the newspaper business and a household name across the country.

William Thomas Stead was a British writer and journalist. He was a pioneer of investigative journalism, and one of the most controversial figures in British journalism during the Victorian era.
He was at times brilliant, unearthing horrors and using the power of publicity to secure reforms, and at times appalling, bending the truth and abandoning accuracy for melodramatic effect.

Wonder Woman was wearing a pink belt.
Wonder Woman wasn't wearing her tiara.
She wasn't wearing her bracelets.
Wonder Woman was holding a whip.
Superman was lifting a car.
Superman wasn't wearing his cape.
He was shooting red lasers.
The Hulk was smashing a house.
He was wearing a mask.
Wolverine was fighting with his long claws.
Captain America was holding a hammer.
Captain America wasn't holding a shield.
Iron Man was wearing a blue armour.
Iron Man was holding a sword.
He was wearing a cape.
Invisible Woman was creating a force field.
She was wearing a hood.

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There are two widespread underlying assumptions here that need to be challenged. The first relates to the ways in which national identity is often understood in terms of ethnicity. As the cultural scholar Paul Gilroy remarked in his book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, in Britain “conceptions of national belonging and homogeneity… not only blur the distinction between ‘race’ and nation, but rely on that very ambiguity for their effect”. The second assumption is that there is an exclusive bond between a language and the nation it naturally belongs to. In turn, these two assumptions combined produce a third one: only those who are the rightful members of a nation, by birth and by race, are legitimate speakers of the language of that nation.
Citing a number of research studies, Holliday made the point that native-speakerism is not a matter of language alone, but is closely connected to ethnicity and race, even though this connection is rarely made explicit. It produces situations of great inequality around the world. In the field of English language teaching, for example, it is not
uncommon for jobs to be available only for native speakers (sometimes explicitly defined as “white” or “Caucasian”), or for non-native speakers to receive significantly lower remuneration even when they possess higher qualifications. This kind of inequity affects migrants in general. A 2011 study found that African migrants’ “accents and varieties of English had been treated as inferior by ‘native speakers’ in traditional English speaking countries”. According to the study, migrants were also, “made to feel as if they were unproficient in English, weak in communication skills, or unintelligible. They got the impression that only speaking in the prestige / native varieties of English counted for proficiency and educational or professional success.”
Native-speakerism is also intertwined with a colonial view of the world where the colonizer is attributed with cultural superiority over the colonized. This mentality has persisted well after the end of colonialism and is so pervasive that it affects the ways non-native speakers see themselves too – as inadequate and defective users of English. Tellingly, the Gambian woman in the Channel 4 segment said, “I don’t have confidence for myself to speak English” - summing up this mindset exactly.
It is important that we become more conscious of the fact that English is not just an “English” language and that the ability to speak it has nothing to do with how “English” a person looks or behaves.