This paper describes a mixed methods study of Japanese first-year tertiary learners' attitudes to English language learning models. It outlines the results from a survey comprised of a verbal guise test (measuring respondents' attitudes to both linguistic and personality features) and vocabulary elicitation, which was administered to 87…

The teaching of English as an additional language or dialect (EALD) in Australia has been problematised partly due to teachers' limited understanding of learners' linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The gap could be potentially bridged with the integration of intercultural pragmatics (IP). Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study…

The study describes a pedagogic adaptation of the matched guise technique with the aim to raise linguistic self-awareness of L2 accentedness stereotyping effects among Swedish pre-service teachers. In the experiment, 290 students attending teacher training programs were exposed to one of two matched guises, representing either L1 accented Swedish,…

Research on language acquisition has long examined the native/non-native English-speaking teacher (NEST/NNEST) debate, particularly in relation to how teachers are perceived. Despite this body of research, the point of view of the parents has been disregarded, as well as the analysis of crucial variables such as students attending extracurricular…

In this study, we investigated Turkish EFL teachers' level of recognition of English accent varieties and their attitudes regarding three common domains, status (e.g. educatedness, intelligence), solidarity (friendliness, kindness), and dynamism (confidence, talkativeness). We also explored the English teachers' choices of English accents in…

While listeners tend to downgrade speakers' accent and comprehensibility when they perceive them to be from a different language community--a process known as reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS)--research has generally relied solely on quantitative data such as Likert scale ratings. The current study sought to extend the analysis further by…

The commercial Sinhala-medium FM radio practice of code-mixing between Sinhala and English is criticised by some of the mainstream Sinhala-speaking groups of Sri Lanka as unrestrained and thus causing the degeneration of the native language of Sinhala. Regardless of this disapproval, this new style of code-mixing has now spread into the FM media…

These days, many pre-service and in-service language English language teachers now complete at least part of their professional training overseas. There is, thus, an important question concerning the impact of intercultural encounters on teachers' perspectives towards the English language and the teaching of English. This paper reports on a study…

In addition to the examination of non-linguists' evaluations of different speech varieties, in recent years sociolinguists and sociophoneticians have afforded greater attention towards the ways in which naïve listeners perceive, process, and encode spoken language variation, including the identification of language varieties as regionally or…

This study explored Korean university students' beliefs and perspectives on different English varieties, and their transformation in learner perceptions with respect to English learning, diversity in the English language, and learning of different English varieties over the course of a semester. On two occasions, Korean university students (N =…

As a case study of non-linguists' perceptions of accent, this paper investigates how accurately and on what basis Japanese-accented English (JAE) is discernible from other L2 varieties of English in New Zealand (NZ). The paper sheds light on how a feature salient in speech is associated with the perceived sociolinguistic identity of speakers. An…

We know little about what raters rely on when participating in accentedness perception tasks as their qualitative comments are rarely scrutinised. At the same time, we know that (assumed) social information influences listener behaviour. This study investigates rater attitudes to and stereotypes about speakers of different varieties of English,…

Adolescence is a time in young people's lives when identities are being constructed and what their friends say is particularly important. The teenage years are a critical period in terms of attitudes to language, yet there have been relatively few studies of student metalanguage and, to our knowledge, no studies which have considered age-graded…

To account for the full range of language use in contemporary multilingual urban contexts, the notion of target language (TL) needs to be reconsidered. In studies of second language acquisition and language variation, taking TL for granted implies that people agree on what constitutes "good" language, or the standard norm. The TL of…

As part of the attempts to revitalise Corsican, a regional language of France, and to reverse the language shift to French, language activists and academics have sought to apply the model of a polynomic language to what is considered as one language, but what is, in fact, a number of different Corsicans, each with varying levels of mutual…