The effects of English proficiency of the listener on evaluations of moderately-accented Dutch and standard British English in an employment setting

Abstract

English as a Lingua Franca in international business made it more common for employers to interview applicants with non-native English accents and a potentially important consideration that remains underexplored is how listeners’ English proficiency influences evaluations of non-native English speakers. Our study investigated the effects of listeners’ English proficiency on speaker evaluations by employing moderately-accented Dutch and native British English speech fragments concerning an international employment setting, evaluated by Dutch listeners with advanced and intermediate levels of English proficiency on perceived comprehensibility, status, dynamism, solidarity and hirability. The study showed that overall, moderately-accented Dutch was evaluated more negatively than standard British English, and listeners’ English proficiency did not influence the evaluations. The findings indicate that listeners’ English proficiency may have had no effect because the impact of listeners’ English proficiency does not apply to moderate accents or listeners with a language background that is closely related to English.