Second language teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward World Englishes : Factors of comprehensibility and accent perception and acceptance

Abstract: This study aimed to investigate L2 Swedish teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards WE accents. The results suggest that Swedish language teachers have a positive attitude towards diverse English accents despite showing favoritism towards privileged varieties such as AmE and BrE. Nonetheless, there seems to be a disconnect between three factors amongst teachers: knowledge, willingness, and practical application. For students to thrive in the world after their school careers (and during for that matter), the teachers may want to consider modeling the kind of tolerance, openness, and curiosity that they would like to see by acknowledging that English is a global language and pluricentric in nature. This is something that needs to be beyond simply raising awareness. Therefore, this study suggests that teachers, especially at the upper secondary level, be open and aware of WE in the sense that they accept and understand diverse English accents despite rooted favoritism for IC English accents. The most significant finding of the current study is that it shows that diverse English accents are not only comprehensible to L2 learners (to varying degrees) they are also highly acceptable. To this end, it would be advisable that educators and those who design listening comprehension tests alike consider including more diverse English accents in instruction material so that students receive more exposure and become more familiar with outer and expanding circles English language speakers. Additionally, it would be interesting to incorporate these diverse speakers in high-stakes arenas such as national tests. For future research, it might be worthwhile to consider using larger and more diverse samples as far as age, gender, and geographic location are concerned to avoid bias. In this way, the findings here can be validated since teachers likewise students may have different attitudes in other parts of Sweden, and the speakers do not represent their entire speech communities. Lastly, scripted tasks were used in this study, and therefore using everyday conversational utterances might be of interest to mirror more realistic experiences that English language learners may encounter.