Social factors and non‐native attitudes towards varieties of spoken English: a Japanese case study

Abstract

This paper, through the employment of a verbal‐guise study and techniques incorporated from perceptual dialectology, investigated the attitudes of 558 Japanese university students towards six varieties of English speech. Although the results suggest a particularly favourable attitude towards standard and non‐standard varieties of UK and US English in terms of ‘status’, informants expressed greater ‘solidarity’ with a Japanese speaker of heavily‐accented English. Differences in the students’ gender, self‐perceived proficiency in English, exposure to English and evaluations of varieties of Japanese all had significant effects on the informants’ attitudes. The findings are discussed in relation to the pedagogical and language planning implications in English language teaching inside and outside Japan.

The competence and warmth of Thai students’ attitudes towards varieties of English: the effect of gender and perceptions of L1 diversity

“…That is to say, the analysis demonstrated that Thai nationals who were most favourable towards variation in their L1 expressed greater solidarity with speakers of Thai English. This echoes the results of similar prior research undertaken in Japan (McKenzie, 2008a) and the UK (Coupland and Bishop, 2007), where those participants who held the most positive attitudes towards linguistic diversity more broadly were also found to express the greatest levels of ingroup loyalty towards speakers of their own forms of English.…”

“…It may well be that the relative linguistic harmony which exists in Thailand, involving a general tolerance of different forms of the Thai language (Smalley, 1994;Huebner, 2006), can account for such positive ratings for the Thai English speaker. This finding contrasts markedly with the results of equivalent language attitude research conducted in other Asian contexts, and especially in Japan, where there exists considerable evidence to suggest a tendency for university students to evaluate speakers of forms of US and UK English much more highly in terms of competence than English speakers from their own country (e.g., McKenzie, 2008a;McKenzie and Gilmore, 2015 early view;Xu et al, 2010;Yook and Lindemann, 2013).…”

“…This finding is perhaps surprising given the results of equivalent studies undertaken in Japan (McKenzie, 2008a(McKenzie, , 2010Tokumoto and Shibata, 2011), China (Xu et al, 2010), South Korea (Yook and Lindemann, 2013) and Oman (Buckingham, 2015) where university students were repeatedly found to rate the status of their own forms of English significantly less positively than L1 English speech, though in some cases again significantly more favourably than Chinese and Indian English (McKenzie and Gilmore, 2015 early view). Table 2, again demonstrated comparatively favourable warmth ratings for the Thai English speaker, and significantly higher than the Indian, Japanese, Mid-West US and Chinese speakers.…”

“…Much of this research has been conducted amongst university students in Japan (see McKenzie, 2008aMcKenzie, , 2010McKenzie and Gilmore, 2015 early view;Cargile, Takai and Rodriguez, 2006;Sasayama, 2013) and the results again point to the differentiation of language attitudes within status and social attractiveness dimensions. Taken together, the findings of these studies have revealed that Japanese users tend to evaluate L1 English varieties, and especially forms of English spoken in the US, most positively in terms of status.…”

“…To assess the potential influence of participant perceptions of sociolinguistic diversity in the Thai language upon English speaker evaluations, following Coupland and Bishop (2007) and McKenzie (2008a), the same 204 participants were asked to respond to the statement 'I like to hear varieties of Thai different from standard Thai', again on an 80 point scale (see Figure 2. below).…”