Your Own English: Gaps & Choices

You speak English every day — but which English, exactly, and what does that cost you?

Name the tension

Write one real situation where your variety of English — your accent, your words, your phrases — caused a misunderstanding or made you feel uncertain.

What is at stake?

If that misunderstanding keeps happening — professionally, socially — what is the real cost? Name one concrete consequence.

Sort the forces

Place the pressures on your English into two zones: things pushing you toward a 'standard' or 'neutral' English, and things pulling you back to your own variety.

Pressure to standardise

Pull toward your own English

How urgent is this — really?

Mark honestly where this sits for you right now. Not where it should sit — where it actually does.

Not urgent at all

Extremely urgent

The obvious answer

Write the advice most people would give you about this tension — the safe, conventional response.

Attack that answer

Look back at step 3. What does the obvious answer cost you — culturally, personally, professionally? What does it quietly ask you to give up?

The hidden trade-off

Write the ONE word that names what is really being negotiated every time you choose how to speak in English — not 'vocabulary' or 'accent', but what is underneath.

Why that word?

Discuss Tell your partner your word from step 7 — do they agree it names the real thing at stake?

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