When teach­ing a sec­ond lan­guage, it may be bet­ter to speak in the accent of the student’s first lan­guage rather than attempt­ing to imi­tate the accent of the tar­get lan­guage, sug­gests research look­ing at how accents may hin­der or expe­dite lan­guage learn­ing and com­pre­hen­sion.

The study that dis­cov­ered this looked at how much aural infor­ma­tion speak­ers of var­i­ous flu­en­cies and from a vari­ety of eth­nic back­grounds required in order to under­stand Hebrew pre­sented to them in dif­fer­ent accents:

The find­ings show that there is no dif­fer­ence in the amount of phono­log­i­cal infor­ma­tion that the native Hebrew speak­ers need in order to deci­pher the words, regard­less of accent. With the Russ­ian and Ara­bic speak­ers, on the other hand, less phono­log­i­cal infor­ma­tion was needed in order to rec­og­nize the Hebrew word when it was pro­nounced in the accent of their native lan­guage than when they heard it in the accent of another language.

So it seems that British foot­ball man­ager Steve McLaren was help­ing Eng­lish learn­ers when he gave his infa­mous inter­view in the Nether­lands fol­low­ing his move there!