engleski

Student's identification of different English varieties

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 (e.g. Stanojević & Josipović-Smojver, 2011, Josipović Smojver & Stanojević, 2013, Josipović Smojver and Stanojević, 2016, Lütze- Miculinić, 2019) or about different English varieties (Drljača Margić & Širola, 2014), there has been no research regarding students’ identification of different English varieties in Croatian context. Previous studies (Williams et al., 1999) have shown that listeners can categorize unfamiliar speakers by dialect with about 30% accuracy. Apart from familiarity, an important role in variety recognition is played by regional closeness and exposure to the variety. The present research set out to study how accurately students can identify individual speakers of different regional and EFL varieties of English. The study was conducted on 67 first-year English students who completed an anonymous questionnaire. The items for the questionnaire were based on Paunović (2009) and Alić (2021). The study was based on a verbal-guise technique, where participants listened to 10 speakers reading out the same paragraph. Croatian students showed poor results in variety recognition. They had the best identification results when listening to Croatian speaker speaking English (76.9% of correct identifications), which is of no surprise as he was the only EFL speaker and the students were familiar with this type of accent. They had the most problems identifying the speakers from South Africa (13.4%) and Northern Ireland (10.7%). The results show that students probably still operate with very broad concepts, like “British” or “American” English, since they were unable to pinpoint the speakers from South England (32.8%) or California (19.7%), varieties that can often be heard in various settings. The Californian speaker was identified as a speaker from New York (19.7%), Southern USA (18.1%) and Canada (16.6%), which shows that subtle differences in regional identity are lost to the untrained ear, and that familiarity sometimes does not play an important role in variety identification.

English varieties, identification, misidentifications, attitudes, Croglish

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