‘I like my accent but…’: EFL teachers’ evaluation of English accent varieties

Abstract

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 various language-using contexts. Through the verbal-guise technique, we were able to evaluate the teachers’ language attitudes towards accents, yet we also integrated a questionnaire to further examine the issue for teacher attitudes and ideologies concerning language education. The findings revealed that recognition of English accent varieties was greater with American English and the local accented English. The ratings of status, solidarity, and dynamism showed that speakers’ accents had a strong effect on how the language teachers treated them. Few teachers reported to include various English accents in language courses due to the teachers’ strong preference for L1 accent varieties in the class. Similarly, the L1 accents were ranked significantly higher in the formal contexts, the teaching model in particular. In sum, the accent matter remains to be a meaningful variable for the production of normative language ideologies in the language education market.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2021.1965153 .

Keywords:

• English accent varieties
• English as a foreign language
• teacher perceptions
• Turkish language teachers
• verbal-guise technique

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sinem Sonsaat for her valuable suggestions on the earlier versions of this manuscript and the anonymous Language Awareness reviewers for their constructive comments. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hülya Mısır

Hülya Mısır is a Research Assistant at the Department of English Translation and Interpreting at Cappadocia University, and a Ph. D. Candidate at the Department of English Language Teaching at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She holds an M.A. degree in ELT from Hacettepe University with an exchange year at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. She is a former Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at Florida International University. Her research interests include corpora, discourse analysis, World Englishes, and Translanguaging.

Nurdan Gürbüz

Nurdan Gürbüz is an Associate Professor at the Middle East Technical University, Turkey, where she has been working for over 20 years. Her areas of interest include English language teacher education, spoken discourse, teaching oral communication skills, English as an international language, and intercultural communication.