The evaluation of native and non-native English lecturers’ accents in higher education: Dutch and American students’ evaluations of standard American and Dutch-accented English.
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2018-07-12
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en
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Due to the growing use of the English language in academic settings, lecturers are often required to teach in English instead of their native language. This leads to many lecturers speaking English with a foreign accent. The current study examined to what extent a moderate Dutch, slight Dutch and standard American accent influences non-native English (NNE) and native English (NE) students’ perceived comprehensibility and attitude towards the lecturer in terms of perceived competence, perceived warmth and perceived teaching quality. The experiment used a verbal guise technique where 107 Dutch and 94 American students evaluated an audio fragment of a lecturer with a moderate Dutch accent, a slightly Dutch accent or a standard American accent. The moderately Dutch accented lecturer was evaluated less positively than the slightly Dutch accented lecturer and standard American accented lecturer on all measured variables, except from perceived warmth: no difference in the evaluation of perceived warmth was found between the three different accents. The Dutch and American students differed in their evaluation of the lecturer for the variables perceived competence and perceived teaching quality, since the Dutch students were considered more critical in their evaluation than the American students. No difference was found between the Dutch and American students in their evaluation for the variables perceived comprehensibility and perceived warmth. Additionally, Dutch students found it very important that a lecturer sounded like a native speaker of English, while American students did not. Therefore, it is advisable that Dutch universities consider the results of this study when hiring non-native English lecturers.
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