By Miao Tai

The heavy rain continued all day on March 23rd, but foreign teachers and students still came to the English corner tonight because of their enthusiasm. Ms. Rebecca Reel, Mr. Byron Boaz Sherman, Mr. Robert K Mateja and Dr. Troy Maurice Smith attended today’s English Corner.

Byron, who came from South Africa, showed his fluent Chinese to students. All the students were curious about how he could speak such excellent Chinese. Byron said he learned Chinese by himself and told students as long as they had passion and motivation , they could do well in learning a new language. Then he shared his opinion on accents with students. Byron said there was no good accent or bad accent,there were only different accents. What’s more, English was a global language and we needed to respect different accents from different areas. Moreover, he showed South Africa''''s English accent to students.

Troy was a Russian-American. A student said he was impressed by Russian Americans in some movies, so he asked Troy whether Russian Americans had a strong accent when they spoke English. Tory said he didn''''t have such a strong accent but he thought the accents varied from person to person. Troy also exchanged ideas about Russian culture with a student who came from Harbin and shared his past experiences as a teacher in Libya and Saudi Arabia.

Time passed very quickly,. Teachers and students had a wonderful time to get together this evening. Everybody would look forward to next week’s English corner!