“It ain’t what you say. It’s the way you say it”: adapting the matched guise technique (MGT) to raise awareness of accentedness stereotyping effects among Swedish pre-service teachers

Abstract

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, or L2 accented Swedish. Both guises were based on the same recording, but the L2 accented version had been digitally manipulated using cut-and-paste techniques in order to replicate certain vowel sounds (the [u:]-sound in particular) associated with low-prestige Swedish L2 accentedness. The findings from this experiment were then used as starting point for language awareness raising activities. Our overall results show that the L2 accented manipulated recording was evaluated more favourably than the original L1 accented recording on all investigated variables. One proposed explanation is that respondents were inadvertently influenced by so-called shifting standards effects, i.e. lower standards/expectations are being used as reference points when evaluating the L2 accented recording. This tendency, however, seemed to be less apparent among respondents with bi/multilingual linguistic identities. Following debriefing discussions based on the experiment findings, there were clear indications that respondents did become more aware of inadvertent linguistic stereotyping by participating in the activities.

Keywords:

• Language awareness raising
• linguistic stereotyping
• reverse linguistic stereotyping
• matched guise technique
• L2 accentedness
• pedagogic design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Note that we use the term ‘equivalent’ rather than ‘equal’ to translate the Swedish term ‘likvärdig’. ‘Likvärdig’ does not necessarily imply equality but rather equity.

2 Note that we refer to this study as ‘MGT-inspired’. In order to maximise the pedagogic impact (see Method below), we decided to keep the design as simple as possible. We have thus not followed the typical MGT design of including a number of ‘fillers’ designed to camouflage the samples under investigation. Neither have we presented the listeners with both samples as this would uncover the covert nature of the design given the complex nature of the script (cf. Stefanowitsch, 2005).​​ For a more thorough discussion of the design see Lindvall-Östling et al. (2019).

3 Note that RLS is normally associated with non-linguistic attributes signalling ethnicity triggering distorted evaluations of a person’s linguistic output. Here, however, it is instead a single phonological marker of ethnicity, a shibboleth, that is used as a trigger. However, since this is all that is manipulated, we argue that potential differences in evaluations between the language performance in the original and manipulated recording other than that related to pronunciation are examples of RLS.

4 See https://www.stereotyping.se/youth-language-case.html for the recordings.

5 See evaluation templates on the ‘assessment portal’: https://bp.skolverket.se/web/bs_gy_svesve01/information and https://www.natprov.nordiska.uu.se/digitalAssets/529/c_529434-l_3-k_kp3-exempel-delprov-b-bedomning.pdf

6 The project design has been approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (2016/75-31Ö).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Mats Deutschmann

Mats Deutschmann PhD is professor of English at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro University, Sweden. He has a diverse multidisciplinary research focus which includes sociolinguistics, the status of minority languages in post-colonial educational contexts, language didactics and learning designs with special focus on e-learning and digital humanities. He has just finalised two projects on language and stereotyping funded by the Swedish Research Council and Wallenberg Foundation. Both projects approached the challenge of finding ways to increase sociolinguistic awareness of issues related to language and stereotyping.

Eric Borgström

Eric Borgström PhD is senior lecturer in Swedish language at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro University. His main research interests are in the field of writing - the teaching and assessment of writing, as well as policy issues related to writing. Questions include what ideas about writing are expressed in different policy documents, and what notions of writing and writing development motivate different teaching and assessment practices. How students are positioned and position themselves in relation to these practices is also of interest. As a writing researcher, Eric is interested in the entire education system - from preschool class to university.

Daroon Yassin Falk

Daroon Yassin Falk PhD is senior lecturer in Swedish language at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro university. Her main research interests concern writing and writing development in educational contexts. In recent years her research focus has been on writing development and writing instruction in primary school and language ideologies in lower secondary Swedish teachers’ instructional practice.

Anders Steinvall

Anders Steinvall, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the Department of Language Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. An experienced teacher of English language courses and Linguistics courses in teacher education, he has worked with computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tools for more than 20 years in Higher Education. Steinvall uses ICT as a support tool for students, but also as tool for stimulating discussions and debriefings whose goals are that students reach new heights of learning. His teaching experiences include language and gender, and language and stereotypes. He is an active researcher in the Swedish Research Council project RAVE – Raising Awareness through Virtual Experiencing.

Johan Svensson

Johan Svensson has a PhD in mathematical statistics from Chalmers University of Technology (CTH). His thesis was focused towards the field of survival analyses and reliability theory. After his Ph.D. Johan moved to Umeå where he works as a lecturer in the department of statistics. In Umeå, Johan’s research interest changed to biostatistics, mainly because of the close vicinity to the hospital. Johan likes to apply statistics to solve a wide range of problems that occur in both social and medical sciences. Johan has strong interest for teaching and is working in projects related to teaching research. in cooperation with several departments.