Accent or just plain getting lazy

I never said I enunciated well. The other day with my vo-tech students- I used the word get only I said git (typical for me, wish I could say it was due to coarticulation) immediately my students started talking amongst themselves. I knew something wasn't right so I stopped and asked "What?" One student said we don't understand this "git". Then it hit me like ton of bricks, my enunciation was very poor on that word. They asked me if I would write it on the white board and of course I wrote "get". Then I tried to explain how I just blew it with accents and the lazy tongue etc. We all had a laugh and I tried to enunciate much more precisely after that. Spoke it all my life then I don't use the correct sounds "ain't American English grand"?

Accuracy

I had my vocational technical students/soccer players make a post on Facebook. (It is amazing how a program I thought was just a regional program is very worldwide. The world is flat.) They all have it and it is, until the change they made in format a very easy way to communicate. I am amazed at how accurate they want to be in the use of the language. I am happy they are using the language as that is the way you will learn a language. I don't want them to be just by the book English speakers I want them to be able to carry a conversation in English that will make people say- "Wow " they sure know the idiomaticity of the language. My younger students, in the school district are great kids. At this age I know that vocabulary is a big issue as many will not have the same vocabulary as many of the English speaking students do. They also do not all read well and I feel that is where the problem lies. We must teach every student to read and read well. I know that if they can read (and that involves much more than just saying the words) then we can begin to close the vocabulary gap. What say you?

New Language

For the last couple of years I have been dealing with Spanish as the primary language, that changed this year. Not really because of the schools population, although, we do get foreign exchange students every year from different countries, but because the vocational tech college brought in a soccer program this year. With that they recruited some students/athletes from Brazil. Oh alright, South America that means they speak Spanish right? Wrong! In my narrow mind and that of many others may be how we think but in South America there are many languages spoken one of which is Portuguese. Of course there are some cognates between Portuguese and Spanish but not as many as one would think. As I get older I learn so much more than when I was a young adult. Maybe it is my willingness to realize I don't have all the answers. I have had an opportunity to work with some of these soccer players and I am very impressed with their willingness to learn and to work not to mention the courage it took to travel to another country to go to school. When I was growing up if you went to another state to go to school you were really reaching out there.