Foreign or Native-like? The Attitudes of Czech EFL Learners Towards Accents of English and Their Use as Pronunciation Models
Vědecký článek
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Trvalý odkaz
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/101838Identifikátory
ISSN: 2336-6702
Kolekce
- Číslo 1 [13]
Datum vydání
2018Nakladatel
Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakultaZdrojový dokument
Studie z aplikované lingvistiky - Studies in Applied LinguisticsRok vydání periodika: 2018
Ročník periodika: 9
Číslo periodika: 1
Práva a licenční podmínky
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/Klíčová slova (anglicky)
English, English as a Lingua Franca, foreign accent, language attitudes, pronunciationAttitudes of language users to English in the international context certainly do not rank among
newly studied subjects. One of the frequent caveats of the ongoing research, however, is that it
mostly targets university students of English, which may provide a very skewed perspective. This
study focuses on young Czech speakers of English who have studied or are studying other disciplines
and uses an online survey to examine their attitudes to English pronunciation in general and to their
own pronunciation, to various accents of English and also to exposure to model accents. Analyses of
145 respondents show that 70% of them would like to acquire a native-like accent (most frequently
General British), even though most of them use English with other foreigners (and not native speakers).
They prefer to be exposed to many different accents of English, native and non-native, and believe
that learners should themselves choose which accent they want to regard as a model. One of the
most important findings concerns the participants’ belief that pronunciation is teachable and that
it is worth working on it; this should provide encouragement to teachers of English. In general, our
results suggest that the ELF approach and the associated Lingua Franca Core concept do not seem to
be relevant for young Czech users of English.