engleski

Students' identification of different English varieties in the digital era

Today's technology allows quick and easy communication with speakers from a variety of language backgrounds, and the communication of online participants is predominantly in English. Although much is already known about the attitudes of Croatian students towards their own English pronunciation (Stanojević and Josipović-Smojver, 2011), there has been little research regarding students’ attitudes towards varieties of English and their identification. Previous studies (Drljača Margić & Širola, 2014, Paunović, 2009, ) have shown that students consider “Southern English” / “British” English to be more prestigious than “American” English, but when compared to other varieties, these varieties are still connected with more positive attitudes, such as “correct” or “standard”, than other varieties of English. The research set out to discover not only the attitudes of students towards different varieties, but also how well can students identify individual speakers of different regional and ELF varieties of English. The study was conducted on 68 first-year English students who completed an anonymous questionnaire consisting of differential scales for various traits in the dimensions of social prestige, closeness, personal integrity, as well as geographical identification of each variety. Our preliminary results show that students have attributed the most positive traits to the speaker of “Southern English” and the most negative ones to the speaker from Croatia. As for the accent identification, the students were the most successful in recognizing the speaker from Croatia and had the most problems identifying the speaker from Northern Ireland. The results implicitly show that the introduction of new university courses, which would help students expand their awareness of language varieties, could potentially lead to greater acceptance and identification of different varieties of English language.

English varieties, attitudes, accent identification

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