881. The first non-native speaker to read the UK TV news (with Barbara Serra)

Barbara Serra is an award-winning Italian journalist who has spent much of her career reading the news in the UK on various high-profile well-established English language news networks including the BBC, Channel 5, Al Jazeera English and Sky News.

Barbara has quite a specific relationship with English. It’s her dominant language but not her native language. She has a certain accent, which does place her outside the UK somehow.

So how has this affected her career as a news reader and reporter? What is the story of her English? What kind of challenges has she faced while reading the news in the UK? And what does this all tell us about learning English, what it means to improve your accent, the relationship between accent and identity, the definition of “native” and “non-native speaker”, the status of different English accents in the English speaking world?

Barbara's email newsletter "News with a foreign accent" https://barbaraserra.substack.com/

Barbara's website with course info https://www.barbaraserra.info/

Luke talks to Alastair Budge about Paris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jveYc5vFh7A&ab_channel=LeonardoEnglish on  @LeonardoEnglishCom 

Luke on Elena’s mtunonon's podcast "Online Bound" https://www.elenamutonono.com/2024/04/25/1-mln-subscribers/

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