Non-rhoticity: A sign of failure?

Another interesting conversation I had, this time with Taiwanese linguists, at IAWE Hong Kong.

One of them said: "I noticed that you have a British accent." So he noticed my non-rhoticity and connected that with a British accent. This is not surprising; after all, he's a specialist.

"But many students in Taiwan don't make that connection," I said. "They just think that I'm a poor speaker of English, just because I don't roll my /r/ like their junior high school teachers did."

He said something very important. He said the pronunciation of rhotic /r/ is so emphasized in Taiwan's English teaching that non-rhoticity is considered a failure in an attempt to produce it!

Unless you are a Caucasian from the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, etc., that is. (People often listen with their eyes, more than they do with ears.)

Indeed, in a book called "KK音標速成秘笈", the author says:
中國學生（尤其是說閩南語的同學）發此音時，舌頭大都不夠捲，也不夠軟，而中國北方省份的居民，如北平人，發此音就發得很好。若想把美語說得「溜」就得每天花一點時間練習這個音 (p. 50)

On another page he also says:
每天練習國語的注音符號「ㄦ」的聲音，可使舌頭變得較靈活。另外準備一面小鏡子觀察自己發音時的嘴型。(p. 25)

So I did a little experiment in one of my classes. I played a recording of a very typically British RP-sounding speaker, and showed them a picture of a Japanese guy at the same time. Then I asked them what they thought about the accent.

They said "Horrible! This guy's got to do something about his strong Japanese accent!" or something similar!

By the way, the above author says in his book that when he was growing up as a child, his parents were speaking in a "foreign language". (Of course he can't say they were speaking in Japanese! He's an English teacher for goodness' sake!) That's probably why he was drilled by his Mandarin teachers to pronounce the "ㄦ" correctly. So he transferred that to English.

So then, this has got all to do with the "正音 Ideology", then. Well, that's another topic.

In the meantime, if I want to keep my job as an English teacher, I should better get in front of a mirror and start going: "rr, rrr, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!"