The Role of Variety Recognition in Japanese University Students’ Attitudes Towards English Speech Varieties

The sociolinguistics of variety identification and categorisation: free classification of varieties of spoken English amongst non-linguist listeners

“…Comments regarding the perceived incorrectness of Asian English speech amongst UK university students parallels the findings of a study by McKenzie (2008a) amongst Japanese university students, where the native varieties of English speech presented for identification were generally considered to embody 'notions of correctness' but the English spoken by Japanese nationals was largely stigmatised. McKenzie attributed the findings to the construction of a pervasive 'native speaker ideology' amongst Japanese users of English more widely.…”

The competence and warmth of Thai students’ attitudes towards varieties of English: the effect of gender and perceptions of L1 diversity

“…Following Clark and Schleef (2010) and McKenzie and Gilmore (2015 early view), as a means to capture a more subtle measurement of participant judgements than those achieved on more traditional 5 or 7-point scales employed in much of the previous language attitude research, the listeners in the present study were requested to rate the speakers on a number of bi-polar personality traits by placing an 'x' at a specific position along an 80-point semantic-differential scale (see also Bard, Robertson and Sorace, 1996). Moreover, to allow for a valid comparison with the findings of similar prior research conducted amongst other Asian university students, the traits employed in McKenzie's (2008bMcKenzie's ( , 2010) Japanese study were used to construct the semantic-differential scale in the present study. To avoid any left-right bias in participant responses (Oppenheim, 1992), the positive traits were randomly positioned sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right of the scale.…”

“…Taken together, the findings of these studies have revealed that Japanese users tend to evaluate L1 English varieties, and especially forms of English spoken in the US, most positively in terms of status. In contrast, whilst there is some evidence that Japanese students express solidarity towards speakers identifiable as Japanese (McKenzie, 2008b), the English speech of nationals from other areas of Asia, including China, India and Thailand, tend to be downgraded on both status and solidarity traits (McKenzie and Gilmore, 2015 early view). In other East Asian contexts, the results of recent research examining evaluations of Chinese and Korean students towards specific forms of English have indicated that UK and US varieties were rated significantly more highly in terms of status, but not necessarily solidarity, than either 'local' Chinese or Korean English speech forms (Xu, Wand and Case, 2010;Yook and Lindemann, 2013).…”

English or Englishes? Outer and Expanding Circle Teachers’ Awareness of and Attitudes towards their Own Variants of English in ESL/EFL Teaching Contexts

“…For example, in Japan (McKenzie, 2008;Suzuki, 2011), in Korea (Ahn, 2014;McDonald & McRae, 2010;Young & Walsh, 2010), in Denmark (Ladegaard & Sachdev, 2006); in Greece (Sifakis, 2009;Sifakis&Sougari, 2005), in Taiwan (Huang, 2016;Luo, 2016), in Hong Kong (Zhang, 2013), in China (Meilin& Xiaoqiong, 2006, in Norway (Rindal 2010), in Europe (Groom, 2012) and in Iran (Sharifian, 2009(Sharifian, , 2010. Overall, these studies have shown tendencies concerning degree of awareness of other varieties of English, preferences towards these varieties, as well as their social and cultural meanings.…”