Problem Proposed solution
Undergraduates have stereotypes and
biases which, if not put aside, interfere with
a potentially positive and valuable learning
opportunityNoneA small body of research has been established which moves beyond the
anecdotal data usually called forth in this debate. A few studies have
concentrated on the undergraduate’s ability to distinguish between accents
and make fair assessments of English proficiency. Orth (1982) found that
undergraduates were not very good at making such assessments; their
evaluations of non-native English-speaking instructors were biased by the
grades they anticipated receiving from the instructor. More recently, a
group of Canadian and American scholars have looked very closely at
issues of comprehensibility, intelligibility and the importance of listener
attitude for students of English as a second language (please see suggested
additional readings at the end of this chapter).
Such studies indicate that success in communication between L1 and L2
speakers is far more complex than has been suggested here. For example,
native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and English listened
to the same set of recordings of English spoken with a foreign accent.
Despite the differences in their native languages, they showed an
unexpected degree of agreement on the intelligibility and accentedness of
the recordings (Munro et al. 2006). That is, a native Japanese speaker is no
more or less able to understand Japanese-accented English than a native
English speaker, which suggests that the properties of speech itself are
important in how accent is perceived.
Rubin and Smith (1990) found that students were not always able to
distinguish between different levels of accentedness and yet perceptions,
right or wrong, served as a very good predictor of how the student rated
the teacher. Thus, if students assessed an instructor with a very slight
Cantonese accent as highly accented, they also found that person to be a
poor teacher. In another study that drew a great deal of attention, Rubin