Student perceptions of diverse accents of English in a multilingual London post-1992 university

Abstract

Previous research in language attitudes has focused primarily on the attitudes of international students toward different accents of English, the attitudes of home or domestic students in the UK remain still under researched. However, the higher education sector in England is not homogenous, with the two-tier system between research-intensive universities and teaching intensive, or post-1992 universities. There is a lack of understanding of the language attitudes toward diverse accents of English of this underrepresented group of students found primarily in post-1992 institutions. With this in mind, this article has explored student perceptions of diverse accents at a post-1992 university through the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia. Contrary to previous attitude studies, our findings suggest that the participants have higher levels of empathy toward varieties of English signaled through accent and that the heteroglossic context of London had had a positive impact on those attitudes. However, the participants still expressed a detectable tension between conforming to the imposed norms of standard language use and pushing against them. The paper concludes with a call to challenge traditional deficit views of multilingualism and increase student critical language awareness in a safe structured environment.

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