Context matters

Abstract

This paper presents the results of two largely parallel verbal guise studies that elicited students’ attitudes toward different standard varieties of English. The studies were conducted in the small anglophone Caribbean island country of Grenada. The two studies were contextualized in the domains of education and newscasting, respectively, with the aim of finding out how language attitudes are influenced by context in societies where different endo- and exonormative standards are of relevance. As hypothesized, the results revealed strong differences between the evaluations of speakers of the two domains and confirm that contextualization is crucial in language attitude research. Against previous hypotheses, however, the acceptance of endonormative standard accents was stronger in the more globally open context of newscasting than in the more locally restricted domain of education. The results are discussed against the background of the sociolinguistic situation in Grenada and inform on endonormativity and norm orientation in one of the underresearched island countries of the anglophone Caribbean.

Language Ideologies and Identities on Facebook and TikTok

“…Moreover, in as far as teachers were, at least historically, viewed as language experts, modelling standardised English and providing norms of English usage (see Deuber 2009;Devonish and Thomas 2012: 181;Hackert 2016: 88), the decision to set the videos in a simulated classroom environment allows the 67 Language Ideologies influencers to, wittingly or unwittingly, claim an expert identity. However, unlike traditional teachers, who use, or are at least expected to use, standardised Caribbean varieties (see Meer et al 2019;Hänsel et al 2022), TikTok teachers model Creole.…”

Teaching Sound Symbolism Through Japanese Pop Culture. A Response to Kawahara (2018)

“…A more rigorous approach to the assessment of student attitudes towards local varieties should be implemented in order to rule out subjectivity from variable construction processes. Recent research suggested that student attitudes change when the evaluated variety is uttered by teachers vs. other professional roles (Hänsel, Westphal, Meer, Deuber, 2022). For this reason, future explicit attitude profiling techniques in SoTL should be more context specific.…”