Students’ attitudes towards RP and other British
accents |
|
Jarosław
Weckwerth (Poznań) |
This short paper will present the preliminary results of an experiment
conducted at the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University. The aim of the
experiment was to examine the students’ attitudes towards RP vs. other British
English accents, and to test their ability to recognise them. Thirteen
one-minute recordings were played to 113 first- and second-year students from
groups in which British English is taught as the model variety. Three of the
recordings were judged to exemplify RP, six were recordings of young speakers
from Cambridge with local features present to varying degrees, and four
strongly accented recordings came from young speakers from Liverpool, Newcastle,
Dublin and Belfast. The students were asked to use a scale from 1 to 5 to rate
each voice for “suitability as a model for teaching English pronunciation”. In
addition to that, they were asked to state what accent the respective speakers
used. The most conservative RP voice was rated highest as a model. The ratings
for the Cambridge voices were inversely proportional to the amount of local
features present in the pronunciation of the speakers. The Northern and Irish
voices scored low. The RP voices were also recognised as such for the most
part. The recognition of the Cambridge voices was less successful. The
remaining accents were hardly ever recognised “correctly”. It seems that there
is a strong correlation between the types of materials used in phonetics
courses and the students’ perceptions.
The Cambridge, Liverpool, Newcastle, Dublin and Belfast recordings came
from the Intonational Variation in English database. The author would like to
thank Esther Grabe for her kind permission to use them.