University students´ perception of exposure to various English accents and their production

Abstract

This article presents students’ perception of English accent varieties in a BA in English and a BA in English Teaching. The purpose of this study was to find out higher education students’ opinions on the incorporation of further English accents in their major. Until now, this topic has not been deeply studied in the Costa Rican context. Results were obtained from a 16-point survey answered by 77 participants. Based on these results, the writer explains that a need to include a variety of native and non-native English accents exists and that a language program would benefit from it. The results demonstrate that 76.6% of students consider being able to imitate several types of English accents important, while 93.5% believe that what is important is being able to recognize and understand several accents. Data show that the majority of students consider the incorporation of various types of accents in their major essential. In practical terms, these results should promote a curricular change where several types of English accents should be incorporated.

A Comparison of Synthetic and Human Speech: an Evaluation by English as a Foreign Language Students in a Public Costa Rican University

“…Some of these limitations are related to language features or contextual characteristics of the message. For example, the speed of delivery (Brown & Lee, 2015;Ur, 2012) or the speakers' accent, especially if no adequate training has been previously provided (Charpentier-Jiménez, 2019;Derwing & Munro, 2015;Field, 2011;Harmer, 2007), may limit students' processing time and frustrate their attempts to decode the message. Additionally, the type of vocabulary (Hadfield & Hadfield, 2008;Watkins, 2010) and the level of formality (Hadfield & Hadfield, 2008) could slow down students' ability to comprehend the message.…”

The Undergraduate Students’ Pronunciation Difficulties of English Fricatives Based on Letter-Sound Relationship

“…Nevertheless, beyond this age, the ability to imitate accurately decreased, and as we all too well know, adults find it extremely difficult to learn the pronunciation of foreign languages as well as other language-related skills. However, pronunciation plays an important role in learning a foreign language, especially English (Charpentier-Jiménez, 2019;Marzá, 2014;Pourhosein Gilakjani, 2011;Zafary, 2021) since it determines someone's comprehensibility and intelligibility in spoken language. This finding implies that pronunciation issues with English sounds may alter word meaning and impair understanding.…”