Accents of English at Czech Schools: Students’ Attitudes and Recognition Skills

Abstract

<jats:p>The study investigates the attitudes of 254 Czech students towards English as the main language taught at secondary schools. The questionnaire enquired about their perspectives on learning English in general, British and American cultures and accents of English. Such preferences may have implications for pronunciation model selection in TEFL. In addition, the participants evaluated 12 words pronounced in British or American English for pleasantness, and also assigned them to one of the varieties. Despite the predominance of American culture and despite equal distribution of cultural preferences and equal aesthetic evaluation of the accents, the British variety was marked as more prestigious and was also identified more successfully. Interestingly, the findings differed between students from the capital city and those from regional schools.</jats:p>

Mastering EFL Pronunciation in North Macedonia and Poland: A Quantitative Questionnaire Approach

“…Although a combination of intelligibility and comprehensibility is a more pragmatic goal, nativeness remains an unbeatable ideal. For reasons of brevity, only one example of the most recent pronunciation survey per country confirming the preference for native models is listed here, both in inner circle countries, 1 for instance, the USA (Zoss, 2015), USA/NZ (Kang, 2010) and also in expanding ones, for example, in Belgium (Meerleer, 2012), Bulgaria (Dimitrova & Chernogorova, 2012), Czech Republic (Jakšič & Šturm, 2017), Croatia (Šišić, 2016), Denmark (Ladegaard & Sachdev, 2006), Finland (Lintunen & Mäkilähde, 2018), Norway (Rindal & Piercy, 2013), Poland (Szymańska-Tworek & Sycz-Opoń, 2020), Serbia (Paunović, 2009), Spain (Calvo Benzies, 2013), Sweden (Vidén, 2018), Turkey (Pullen, 2012) as well as in Asia: Iran (Galbat & Fahandezh Sa'adi, 2018). Furthermore, attitudes of 'nativeness' are reported to alter after formal pronunciation training, in the direction of more leniency toward non-native accents (Lintunen & Mäkilähde, 2018;Waniek-Klimczak et al 2015).…”

Exploring the Accent Mix Perceptually and Automatically: French Learners of English and the RP–GA Divide

“…The same pattern is apparent in Carrie (2017), where a cohort of Spanish students responded that RP was more suitable as a model to emulate, while recognizing that GA was more socially attractive. The Czech students in Jakšič and Šturm (2017) also thought that RP was more prestigious, but RP or GA preferences were partly determined by where (in either the UK or the US) the respondents would like to spend five years of their lives. In Meer et al (2022), German high-school students ranked Southern Standard British first and Standard American second as reference varieties, while English as a second language varieties were perceived negatively.…”