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Accent of One's Own: self-report perspective on accentedness in Czech pre-service EFL teachers

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2019

Abstract

Drawing on Bourdieu's (1977) theoretical framework, our proposed paper strives to characterise the structure of the linguistic habitus of our 250 informants from the specific perspective of their accent-related self-perception and language attitudes. For this purpose, self-report data obtained in a questionnaire form were scrutinised.

The analysed body of our data seems to indicate that the majority of our informants ascribe a clearly positive emotional value to their hitherto experience of one's own accentedness in an authentic communicative context. Furthermore, accented speech does not appear to be a cause for concern in half of the examined sample.

Thus, our results may signal the growing acceptance of non-native teacher identities. Consequently, the elementary premise that we based our preliminary research on and that regards the neutral (native) accents as norm-setting and evaluatively determining might be contested.