Reducing the impact of foreign accentedness in English Medium Instruction

Abstract

Foreign-accented teachers have been shown to trigger negative evaluations by students. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether this form of accent discrimination can be prevented or reduced by raising listeners’ awareness of the undesirability of accent discrimination. In a 2 × 3 between-subject verbal-guise design, 816 (Dutch, international, L1 English) listeners evaluated lecture fragments recorded by Dutch or German speakers with a moderate or slight accent. In the experimental conditions, participants read instructions about not discriminating against accented speakers (explicit instructions) or about not discriminating in general (implicit instructions), while a control group received no instructions. Findings indicate that listeners who had received implicit or explicit instructions evaluated both moderately and slightly accented speakers more positively than listeners who had received no instructions. The present study has demonstrated the effectiveness of a prejudice control intervention across a variety of listener groups. The intervention in our study, consisting of written instructions, has the practical advantage of being relatively easy to administer.