Helping learners of English to understand and appreciate a variety of accents

What is it about?

This study tested whether English classroom activities based on brief YouTube videos that exposed learners to admirable multilingual English speakers from six countries could improve both their understanding of unfamiliar accents and their reactions to them. After completing the activities, a secondary school English class in Sweden liked and understood two unfamiliar accents better and thought they were easier to understand, while a similar class that did not do these activities did not, although both classes continued to think the speakers were low-status and heavily accented. The findings show that these short, easy-to-implement activities on a limited set of accents can help pupils with new accents that are not part of the training.

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Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Why is it important?

English is used worldwide by people with many different language backgrounds, but most English learners are only exposed to a standard US and/or UK accent. As a result, they often react negatively to other accents and have difficulty understanding them. The intervention described in this paper was unusually successful in leading to improved understanding and liking of unfamiliar accents.