Date: Friday, 27 March 2015 at 17:22
Subject: English Firsthand 1 classroom audio CD
Professor M... ........
...... ...... ....... University
......, Japan
Ms K.... ...........
Account Manager
P...... Japan
Tokyo, Japan
Dear Prof H....... and Ms K........
Thank you for your patience a short while ago when I criticised some of your voice actors in San Francisco. The points I should like to make are all concentrated in the second half of the textbook.
Unit 7 Real Stories (p.71)
“Afghan” girl Fahima does not convince me as a real Afghan. A poorly acting American woman tries to speak like someone from Middle East, which never succeeds even from the start.
Unit 8 Real Stories (p.79)
“Japanese” boy Kohei speaks English too well to convince me as a learner of this FL.
Unit 9 Real Stories (p.87)
The “Australian” girl (either Kate or Molina) speaks like some badly-educated Southeast Asian girl. The expression “graduating secondary school” (missing the required “from” in more authentic speech) makes me rather frustrated when I teach my students. I agonise over whether to point out this school grammar sort of error or not. The “secondary school” is very British or Commonwealth-y (including Australian) to make the speech more authentic, though.
Unit 12 Real Stories (p.111)
The British gay designer in Unit 4 (p.37) appears here as Steve in France. Although no nationality is given to this Steve, which is no French name (a Frenchman’s name should be Stéphane like French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappeli), the voice actor feigns a Frenchman until the end of the second paragraph out of 4 quite well as in the pronunciation of “trend”; but in the latter half of the entire text, he reveals his true identity as a Briton, failing to miss the consonant “h” and flowing towards the end.
I’d much appreciate if you could possibly ask the SF studio people to improve and authenticate the audio recordings.
Toshiaki HARADA
Centre for General Education (Sōgō Kyōiku Sentā)
Showa Women’s University (SWU: Shōwa Joshi Daigaku)
Tokyo, Japan