This paper, through the employment of a verbal‐guise study and techniques incorporated from perceptual dialectology, investigated the attitudes of 558 Japanese university students towards six varieties of English speech. Although the results suggest a particularly favourable attitude towards standard and non‐standard varieties of UK and US English in terms of ‘status’, informants expressed greater ‘solidarity’ with a Japanese speaker of heavily‐accented English. Differences in the students’ gender, self‐perceived proficiency in English, exposure to English and evaluations of varieties of Japanese all had significant effects on the informants’ attitudes. The findings are discussed in relation to the pedagogical and language planning implications in English language teaching inside and outside Japan.

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The Educational Linguistics book series focuses on work that is: innovative, transdisciplinary, contextualized and critical.In our compartmentalized world of diverse academic fields and disciplines there is a constant tendency to specialize more and more. In academic institutions, at conferences, in journals, and in publications the crossing of disciplinary boundaries is often discouraged. This series is based on the idea that there is a need for studies that break barriers. It is dedicated to innovative studies of language use and language learning in educational settings worldwide. It provides a forum for work that crosses traditional boundaries between theory and practice, between micro and macro, and between native, second and foreign language education. The series also promotes critical work that aims to challenge current practices and offers practical, substantive improvements.For other titles published in this series go to www.springer.com/series/5894

In addition to the examination of non-linguists' evaluations of different speech varieties, in recent years, sociolinguists and sociophoneticians have afforded greater attention towards the ways in which naïve listeners' perceive, process and encode spoken language variation, including the identification of language varieties as regionally or socially localised forms. The present study attempts to extend understanding of non-linguists' perceptions of linguistic diversity through the investigation of how accurately and consistently UK-born students, resident in the north-east of England, can identify the speaker place of origin of six forms of L1 and L2 English. The results demonstrate that whilst the process of encoding indexical properties to and categorisations of speech stimulus as belonging to a specific language variety is complex, there is a clear tendency amongst informants to initially identify the speech as either native or non-native, most especially through the perception of specific segmental and non-segmental phonological features, before attempting more fine-grained classifications. The findings also point to the recognition of speaker place of origin at different levels of awareness, above and below the level of individual consciousness.

Implicit-explicit attitudinal discrepancy and the investigation of language attitude change in progress