Figure 6.3 Student evaluation of lecturer’s ethnicity and accent, recorded science lecture
Source: Rubin (1992)
These figures indicate that perceived ethnicity on the basis of the
photograph did have a great deal of significance on the way students
evaluated language. Depending on the slide projected, the students
evaluated the same native speaker of U.S. English as having more or less
of a foreign accent. To put it more bluntly, some students who saw an
Asian were incapable of hearing objectively. It can be stated with absolute
certainty that the pre-recorded language they listened to was native, non-
foreign-accented English; students looking at an Asian face, however,
sometimes convinced themselves that they heard an accent. Here it
becomes clear that the students’ negative preconceptions are at work.