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Swedish Youths as Listeners of Global
Englishes Speakers With Diverse
Accents: Listener Intelligibility,
Listener Comprehensibility,
Accentedness Perception, and
Accentedness Acceptance
Hyeseung Jeong*, Anna Elgemark and Bosse Thorén
Department of Educational Sciences and Languages, Institution of Individuals and Society, University West, Trollhättan, Sweden
As reflected in the concept of Global Englishes, English mediates global communication,
where English speakers represent not merely those from English-speaking countries like
United Kingdom or United States but also global people from a wide range of linguistic
backgrounds, who speak the language with diverse accents. Thus, to communicate
internationally, cultivating a maximized listening proficiency for and positive attitudes
toward global Englishes speakers with diverse accents is ever more important.
However, with their preference for American English and its popular culture, it is
uncertain whether Swedish youth learners are developing these key linguistic qualities
to be prepared for the globalized use of English. To address this, we randomly assigned
160 upper secondary students (mean age 17.25) into six groups, where each group
listened to one of six English speakers. The six speakers first languages were Mandarin,
Russian/Ukrainian, Tamil, Lusoga/Luganda, American English, and British English.
Through comparing the six student groups, we examined their listener intelligibility
(actual understanding), listener comprehensibility (feeling of ease or difficulty),
accentedness perception (perceiving an accent as native or foreign), and
accentedness acceptance (showing a positive or negative attitude toward an accent)
of diverse English accents. The results showed that the intelligibility scores and perception/
attitude ratings of participants favored the two speakers with privileged accents–the
American and British speakers. However, across all six groups, no correlation was
detected between their actual understanding of the speakers and their perception/
attitude ratings, which often had a strong correlation with their feelings of ease/
difficulty regarding the speakers accents. Taken together, our results suggest that the
current English education needs innovation to be more aligned with the national syllabus
that promotes a global perspective. That is, students need to be guided to improve their
actual understanding and sense of familiarity with Global English speakers besides the
Edited by:
Rebecca Blum Martinez,
University of New Mexico,
United States
Reviewed by:
Nobuaki Minematsu,
The University of Tokyo, Japan
Robert Mckenzie,
Northumbria University,
United Kingdom
Julia Forsberg,
Stockholm University, Sweden
Elizabeth Peterson,
University of Helsinki, Finland
*Correspondence:
Hyeseung Jeong
hyeseung.jeong@hv.se
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language, Culture and Diversity,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Education.
Received: 11 January 2021
Accepted: 21 May 2021
Published: 10 June 2021
Citation:
Jeong H, Elgemark A and Thorén B
(2021) Swedish Youths as Listeners of
Global Englishes Speakers With
Diverse Accents: Listener Intelligibility,
Listener Comprehensibility,
Accentedness Perception, and
Accentedness Acceptance.
Front. Educ. 6:651908.
doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.651908
Abbreviations: L1: First Language L2: Second Language GA: General American RP: Received Pronunciation LI: Listener
Intelligibility LC: Listener Comprehensibility AP: Accentedness Perception AA: Accentedness Acceptance.
Frontiers in Education | www.frontiersin.org June 2021 | Volume 6 | Article 6519081
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 10 June 2021
doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.651908
native accents that they prefer. Moreover, innovative pedagogical work should be
undertaken to change Swedish youths’perceptions and attitudes and prepare them to
become open-minded toward diverse English speakers.
Keywords: global englishes, swedish youth learners, listener intelligibility, listener comprehensibility, accentedness
perception, accentedness acceptability, implications for language education
INTRODUCTION
In this globalization era, English is not only an official or de facto
official language of more than 70 countries or territories (e.g.,
India, Nigeria, Singapore, Australia, United Kingdom, and
United States), but it is also the most common contact
language that mediates international communication among
people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Reflecting the vast plurality and diversity concerning where,
and by whom around the globe the language is used, the
concept of Global Englishes has been introduced (e.g., Jenkins,
2015;Galloway, 2017).
In view of the global state of English, as in many other
countries, the language is a compulsory school subject from
Grade 3 onwards in Sweden (Swedish National Agency for
Education, 2018). Through the curriculum reforms
introduced in 2001 and 2011, the English syllabus for
upper secondary school, administered by the Swedish
National Agency for Education (2011), has promoted a
global perspective for teaching and learning the language
(Hult, 2017). According to Hult (2017),thesyllabus
showcases a government policy that encourages a move
“away from an English as a foreign language perspective”
(p. 271) and an advancement “beyond the British and
American perspectives that have traditionally held sway in
Sweden”(p. 277). The syllabus is instead aligned “with a
contemporary understanding of English in applied
linguistics,”that may include “highlighting global linguistic
variations in English and attending to the use of English for
intercultural communication”(p. 277).
The currency and timeliness of the syllabus is evident in view
of recent debates on how traditional English language teaching
that focuses only on British or American English is incapable of
preparing learners for the current use of English as a global
contact language, where speakers from different varieties vastly
outnumber the two varieties focused by English teachers (see
Bayyurt and Dewey, 2020;Rose and Galloway, 2019;Rose et al.,
2020). In fact, the global perspective of this English syllabus is a
response to the reality that, for Swedish citizens, English is
primarily a contact language for international communication,
both domestically and overseas, in different areas of society and
private life (Björkman, 2011;Bolton and Meierkord, 2013;Hult,
2012;Kuteeva, 2014;Norrby, 2015). For example, by participating
in the Bologna Process, Swedish universities have become
increasingly internationalized, and English facilitates
communication between international and Swedish lecturers
and students (Björkman, 2018). Moreover, “English is used as
an official language in a number of Swedish corporations in the
private sector”(Sundqvist and Sylvén, 2014, p. 5).
By and large, the Swedish are known to be highly proficient in
English (World Economic Forum, 2012). As of 2020, Sweden was
ranked fourth only to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland by
the EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI, 2020) among 100 non-
English L1-speaking countries, even ranking above countries
where English is an official language, such as Singapore and
South Africa. As a subgroup, Swedish youths have also received
recognition for their English competence, as well as their strong
motivation for learning the language (Henry and Cliffordson,
2015;Norrby, 2015). However, simply being a proficient user of
English is not sufficient (Prodromou, 2008). Maximized listening
comprehension and a positive attitude toward Global Englishes
speakers with diverse accents are also of great importance for
intercultural communication (Matsumoto, 2011;Melchers et al.,
2019). In this regard, current information about the relationship
of Swedish youths with English in the existing literature does not
provide a clear basis for assessing whether the global perspective
of the national English syllabus has been successfully
implemented. While Swedish youths show strong favoritism
toward American English and its popular culture (Cabau,
2009;Eriksson, 2019;Henry et al., 2019), there is paucity of
research on how they react to “other”English accents, with few
studies indicating that young Swedish people feel negatively about
English accents they perceive as “non-native”(e.g., Kuteeva,
2014).
Particularly, it has not yet, to our knowledge, been ascertained
how Swedish youths perform as listeners of speakers of English as
a global contact language or lingua franca with diverse accents, by
determining their actual understanding, and their perceptions
and attitudes in connection to that understanding. Our study
seeks to respond to this research gap by addressing the need for
assessing whether the stated goals of the national curriculum are
being achieved. To accomplish this, we draw on the concepts of
intelligibility (actual understanding of speech with a certain
accent), comprehensibility (degree of feeling easy or difficult in
understanding an accent), accentedness (perceived degree of an
accent), and acceptability (degree of acceptance of an accent).
These concepts have been used extensively to evaluate second
language (L2) learners as speakers and their pronunciation
against a listener’s judgment (see Thomson, 2018) but seldom
to assess learners as listeners of different Global Englishes accents
and their listening abilities, which may have ecological validity,
particularly in the context of international communication.
Although there is an increasing trend in research on attitudes
toward Global Englishes speakers in order to help inform the
curriculum innovation process (e.g., Fang, 2020;Lee and Drajati,
2019;Tsang, 2020), the reports are usually about attitudes
emerging from preconceptions of different accents;
examination of listeners attitudes toward accents in relation to
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
actual understanding of the speakers is seldom found in the
extant literature. Our investigation of the understanding and
attitude, emerging from the same speech stimuli, is to find out
what pedagogical help learners need to become globally
competent listeners. Therefore, in addition to the novelty of
the research topic, our study possesses the methodological
significance of using these constructs from a new perspective.
BACKGROUND
English for Swedish Youths:
Unproblematic?
A probable explanation for the high English proficiency of
Swedish youths is the prevalence of the language in their lives.
Like many other young Europeans, particularly those in other
Scandinavian countries, Swedish youths develop their English
through extensive exposure to and engagement with popular
culture, as well as studying the language as a compulsory school
subject (Cabau, 2009;Henry, 2019b). Often, the language
mediates their leisure time activities, and they are surrounded
by and eagerly consume English-mediated popular culture,
including games, films, YouTube clips and channels, television
series, music, news, online blogs, and literature (Sundqvist, 2011).
Therefore, for young Swedish people, English “generates
immediate associations with imaginary worlds of glamour,
celebrity, and consumer aspirations,”“indexes pleasure and
hedonism,”and “triggers identifications with desirable
products and desired identities”(Henry, 2019b, p. 24). Much
of the popular culture that surrounds Swedish youths “has its
roots in”the cultures of English-speaking countries, particularly
American culture (Henry, 2019a, p. 75). Consequently, the
younger generation is “greatly attracted by Anglo-American
culture”(Cabau, 2009, p. 140). This tendency has been traced
to schools; for example, in Henry et al. (2018), nearly all teaching
strategies that upper secondary English teachers considered
appealing to their students and, thus, effective to motivate
their learning had a strong focus on privileged variants of
English and their national cultures, particularly American
English and its popular culture.
However, while popular culture may enhance the motivation
to learn English, having major contact with the language through
one national culture can result in a limited perspective of the
language, its cultural history, and its users. The English of popular
culture that Swedish youths admire represents “only a small
fraction of the varieties of English, types of speakers, and
culture that English users today encounter”(Matsuda, 2018,
pp. 26–27). As highlighted in the national syllabus (Swedish
National Agency for Education, 2011), most Swedish youths
will eventually “need English to communicate with almost
anyone in the global community,”rather than merely “for
personal development or cultural awareness,”for which they
need to develop “maximum scope of proficiency”through “wide
exposure”(Melchers et al., 2019, p. 202). Although unchallenged
and, in fact, endorsed through their school education (see Henry
et al., 2019;Mohr et al., 2019), the orientations of young Swedes
toward English and English-speaking culture may not be
congruent with the global vision of the national English
syllabus that aims to prepare them for “different social and
cultural contexts, as well as [for] global studies and working
life”(Swedish National Agency for Education, 2011, p. 1).
Thus, while proficient, Swedish youths may not be well
prepared to use English in globalized settings as much as the
vision of the national syllabus. Without pedagogical help “to
experience diverse Englishes,”they, like other English learners,
“may be startled, surprised, confused, overwhelmed, or feel
underprepared for such situations”and may even “develop
negative attitudes toward such varieties that may interfere with
their ability to engage in successful communication”(Matsuda,
2018, p. 29). In this vein, Kuteeva (2014) alarmingly reported that,
while they are aware that English facilitates international
communication, Swedish university students are often not
ready to accept and communicate with people who they think
speak “non-standard”Englishes, as reflected in the following
comment by one of her student participants:
“I also wonder if it is really OK to let, e.g., Indian, Pakistani,
Arabic, or Russian-speaking researchers teach. Their spoken
English with a terribly strong accent makes it difficult for
students to understand what is being said.”(p. 337).
Are English Learners Taught to be Good
Listeners of Global Englishes Accents?
Nascent research has begun to report the positive effects of
exposure to diverse accents on learners attitudes toward and
interest in using English as a global contact language (e.g.,
Attamimi and Chittick, 2018). However, both Swedish youths
and English learners in many other countries are still situated in
instructional settings where native-speaker accents, especially the
General American accent (GA) or the British Received
Pronunciation (RP) accent, are the focus of teaching listening
skills (Sung, 2016;Alonso-Herrero and Lasagabaster Herrarte,
2019;Tsang, 2019) and are presented as “correct”,“standard”
forms (Jansen et al., in press). Thus, “standard native-like English
accents are ubiquitous and predominant in a lot of materials such
as listening exercises”(Tsang, 2019, p. 581), and “exposure to
different accents is not seen as an important part of the
curriculum”(Sung, 2016, p. 192). This trend in listening
instruction goes together with listening tests that primarily
assess learners against “standard”native-speaker accents
(Harding, 2012;Kang et al., 2018;Jenkins, 2020;Sifakis et al.,
2020). Internationally recognized large-scale tests, such as the
Test of English as Foreign Language or the International English
Language Testing System, have begun to incorporate diverse
English accents into listening tests (Kang et al., 2018);
however, the inclusion of accent varieties is partial (Harding,
2012), and whether it has produced a washback effect on teaching
practice is uncertain.
As Derwing and Munro. (2014). (p. 219) noted,
“communication is a two-way street;”thus, gaining an
understanding of an interlocutor’s accent features is as crucial
to being a good listener as having an intelligible pronunciation as
a speaker. However, by focusing only on a couple of privileged
English accents, the teaching of listening seems to keep learners
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
from developing their knowledge of and ability to understand
diverse accents. An indication of this are the iterative reports
about the misunderstandings or communication breakdowns
among L2 speakers caused by accent features distant from GA
or RP (e.g., Field, 2005;Deterding, 2013;Kim and Billington,
2016;Jeong et al., 2020). Moreover, only learning to listen to a few
native pronunciations seems to lead learners to develop negative
attitudes toward “other”accents. In his study of university
students perceptions in Hong Kong, for example, Sung, (2016)
found that many of his participants did not want to be exposed to
diverse English accents and expressed dislike of certain second-
language accents, even though they are situated in an English-as-
an-international-language context and, thus, are aware of the
benefits of understanding diverse accents. Sung observed that the
belief that native-speaker English is the “best”and the “standard,”
may have caused the interviewees to “evaluate non-native accents
against the native-speaker yardstick”(Sung, 2016, p. 196).
Intelligibility, Comprehensibility, and
Perceptions and Attitudes Toward
Accentedness: Who can be Assessed?
Intelligibility,comprehensibility,accentedness, and acceptability
are constructs that have been operationalized to evaluate L2
speakers pronunciation against a listener’s understanding and
perception (Thomson, 2018). Often, listener judges are native
speakers (e.g., Munro and Derwing, 2006;Kennedy and
Trofimovich, 2008) and more recently also L2 speakers (e.g.,
Jeong et al., 2020). While intelligibility, comprehensibility, and
accentedness have been extensively adapted since Munro and
Derwing’s seminal studies (e.g., Munro and Derwing, 1995a;
Munro and Derwing, 1995b), acceptability is a relatively new
construct for measuring listeners negative or positive attitudes
toward perceived accentedness (e.g., Szpyra-Kozlowska, 2014;
Tulaja, 2020).
Although researchers have not reached a consensus regarding
the exact definitions of the four constructs, converging
understandings of each construct have emerged. Intelligibility
is the actual understanding of a speaker’s exact utterance and/or
intended messages, operationalized through the measurement of
listener performance, such as scores from dictation or
comprehension tasks (Derwing and Munro, 2015, pp. 3–8). In
contrast, the other three constructs relate to the listener’s
subjective perception and attitude. Comprehensibility is a
listener’s feeling or experience of whether, and to what extent,
the speaker’s pronunciation is easy or difficult to understand.
Accentedness is the listener’s subjective perception of the degrees
of nativeness or foreignness of a speaker’s accent. Meanwhile,
acceptability represents the extent to which a pronunciation is
accepted by the listener; it is expressed through the listener’s
ratings of an accent, for example, in terms of the degree of
annoyance/irritability (Szpyra-Kozlowska, 2014), correctness,
likability, acceptability of pronunciation teaching purposes
(Sewell, 2012), and acceptability for international
communication (Li-Ann, 2008).
As oral communication is a process involving both speaker
and listener, operationalizing listener’s judgment to assess a
speaker’s pronunciation has some rationale; however, using
the constructs of intelligibility, comprehensibility,
accentedness, and acceptability for assessing speakers has not
been unproblematic. The central problem is the assumption
behind using listener’s judgment to evaluate L2 speaker’s
accent features, which views that listener’s inability “to
understand L2 speech is evidence of the L2 speaker’s linguistic
failures,”and that L2 users are projected as the speaker group
mainly responsible for communication breakdown and thus in
need of pedagogical intervention (Lindemann and Subtirelu,
2013, p. 582). Against such an assumption, it has been argued
that the measurement of the constructs reflects listener’s own
expectations, beliefs, and psychological and linguistic
attributions, although it has been assumed to be an indicator
of a speaker’s inherent accent features (Zielinski, 2008;Kang and
Rubin, 2009;Lindemann and Subtirelu, 2013;Subtirelu and
Lindemann, 2016).
More crucially, since what is determined by the four constructs
is not the speaker’s but the listener’s performance, perception, or
attitude, it can be straightforward and suitable to operationalize
these four constructs to assess learners as listeners. This is
particularly conceivable in the context of English as an
international language, where learners need to develop
“maximum scope of proficiency”through “wide exposure”
(Melchers et al., 2019, p. 202). That is, learners who need to
learn English for international communication will eventually
encounter interlocutors with diverse accents; some of their
interlocutors may be RP or GA speakers, but many more will
be speakers of varieties with phonological systems that are not
congruent with the phonology of prestigious accents or speakers
who maintain pronunciation features inherent in their first
languages. Within all these possibilities, learners have very
little or no control over the accents of their international
interlocutors. Thus, there is ecological validity in utilizing the
four above-mentioned constructs to identify their ability and
inclination as listeners toward different accents, whereby
pedagogical intervention for their perceptual training for
diverse accents can be suggested.
METHOD
Aim and Research Questions
Against the background, the present study investigated Swedish
youths as listeners of diverse English accents in terms of their
actual understanding, feeling of ease or difficulty, perception, and
attitudes toward such accents. To this end, we adapted the four
constructs of intelligibility, comprehensibility, accentedness, and
acceptability, which previous research has utilized to assess
features of speaker’s pronunciation. To clearly indicate that
our study focused on learners as listeners rather than speakers,
we intentionally labeled the constructs:
•Listener intelligibility (LI): actual understanding of an
intended message and/or utterance
•Listener comprehensibility (LC): feeling easy or difficult to
understand an accent
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
•Accentedness perception (AP): perceiving an accent as native
or foreign
•Accentedness acceptance (AA): showing a positive or
negative attitude toward an accent
The research questions corresponding to our aim were as
follows:
1. What are the listener intelligibility (LI), listener
comprehensibility (LC), accentedness perception (AP), and
accentedness acceptance (AA) of Swedish upper secondary
school students for global Englishes speakers with diverse
accents? Are there significant differences among the groups
listening to different speakers?
2. What are the relationships among the listener intelligibility
(LI), listener comprehensibility (LC), accentedness perception
(AP), and accentedness acceptance (AA) of the listener groups
of different speakers?
Listeners
160 students (88 females and 72 males) in their second year of
upper secondary school participated in our study as listeners,
providing consent for participation according to Swedish ethics
legislation. As we report in greater detail in Listening sessions, the
students were randomly assigned to six groups, and each group
listened to one of the six speakers who we present in Speakers.
Recruiting student participants was done with the help of four
English teachers at three different schools in three cities in
southern Sweden, who replied to our request letter. The
students were from seven different classes at the schools,
studying in the Social Sciences (Samhälle), Technologies
(Teknik), Natural Sciences (Natur), and Economics (Ekonomi)
programs. None of them reported hearing problems. According
to a follow-up survey after the main data collection, student’s
mean age was 17.25 years, and their L1s were Swedish (117),
Arabic (21), English (3), and other languages (19). These students
with non-Swedish L1s should possess Swedish proficiency
sufficient to study in regular classes as students with low
Swedish proficiency are placed in a different class.
Through the same follow-up survey, we also found that
students used English substantially outside of school, which is
a common tendency among Swedish youths (see Background). To
the question of how frequently they used English outside of
school, where “1”meant “none”and “9”meant “several hours
every day,”the mean rating was 6.2 (SD 1.8). However, their
extramural English use was much more receptive (listening or
reading) than productive (speaking or writing), when we
compared the 9-point self-reporting scale items for receptive
and productive use of English: robust t (95) 15.5, 20%
trimmed mean difference 3.79, CI 3.3, 4.4, p0, with a
large effect size, Cohen’sd0.8.
In addition, to ensure statistic validity of comparing listener
groups for different speakers, we checked whether there was
interaction between group effect on student’s listening
performances and ratings and three listener individual
variables that we did not control, by means of robust two-way
ANOVAs (see Mair and Wilcox, 2019 for robust statistics). These
variables were: English grades, which were first self-reported as A
to F, but eventually classified into high-grade (A-C) and low-
grade (D-F) after consulting with their teachers; L1s (Swedish L1
and non-Swedish L1); and gender (male and female). Significant
difference between high- and low-grade students as well as
interaction between group effect and grades for LI and LC
were detected (to be reported in Result), conforming to a
study by Harding. (2008), who found that listener’s proficiency
level can influence their performances and perceptions toward
different accents. However, no difference was found between
Swedish L1 and non-Swedish L1 students and between male and
female students for their LI, LC, AP, and AA, and these two
individual variables did not interact with group effect either.
Thus, they were excluded from further analysis.
Speakers
To create speech materials for assessing student participant’s
listener intelligibility (LI), listener comprehensibility (LC),
accentedness perception (AP) and accentedness acceptance
(AA) of diverse English accents, we recruited six speakers
living in Sweden. Table 1 presents information about the
speaker participants.
From 15 proficient English speakers who expressed their
interest in participation, we selected the six speakers as they
met the two following criteria. First, the speakers were assessed to
have typical accent features of their own varieties to a great extent,
according to Gardiner and Deterding. (2020),Swan and Smith.
(2001) and Kortmann and Schneider. (2004). Particularly, the
American and British speakers had pronunciation features
typically presented as the General American accent (GA) and
the standard British Received Pronunciation (RP) (e.g., Collins,
Mees and Carley, 2019;Kretzschmar, 2004). In the online
supplementary material, we include the speaker’s segmental
and prosodic descriptions, which are also compared with the
phonology of their varieties. Regarding the first criterion for
speaker recruitment, we were cautious of considering them
representative of their own English varieties, as, for example,
different speakers from the same variety can have different
degrees of speaker intelligibility, although such a possibility
seems to become much smaller with speakers of “standard”
English (e.g., Kang et al., 2018). Second, to include as diverse
accents as possible, we tried to be sure that two speakers were
from the Inner Circle (British English and American English),
two from the Outer Circle (Indian and Ugandan), and two from
the Expanding Circle (Chinese and Russian/Ukrainian),
according to Kachru, 1992 World Englishes Model. However
Given that the distinction between the Outer and Expanding
Circles is becoming increasingly less distinct (Jenkins, 2015;
Melchers et al., 2019), all the speakers could be simply
classified as Global Englishes speakers with diverse accents,
who use English for working, socializing and communicating
with Swedes and other international people in various contexts.
Listening Tests
Overview of the Tests
To compare six student groups listening to six different speakers,
we prepared two tests for each listener group, with one of the six
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
speaker’s readings of passages and sentences. One test (hereafter,
main idea test) was to assess students’listener intelligibility (LI) as
comprehending intended messages overall and the other test
(hereafter, dictation test) was to determine LI as
understanding every uttered word (see Derwing and Munro,
2015, pp. 3-8 for the definition of intelligibility that our study
draws on). The main idea test comprised six questions, and each
question was to identify a person’s job described in a passage. The
dictation test had 20 questions and each question was to write
down a sentence verbatim. Besides the LI questions, both main
idea and dictation tests also included one listener
comprehensibility (LC) item, one accentedness perception
(AP) item and four accentedness acceptance (AA) items. With
two separate tests, we intended to assess the two aspects of
LI–overall understanding of intended messages and detailed
understanding of every uttered word. We also intended to see
if the two listening tasks would evoke similar or different LC, AP,
and AA ratings, about which previous studies offer mixed
findings.
Preparation of speech materials,preparation of online testing,
Listening sessions following report how we prepared speech
materials and online testing, as well as the procedure for test
administration.
Preparation of Speech Materials
As the first step of creating listening tests, we recorded the six
speaker’s readings of two texts. One text was for the main idea
test, comprising 10 short passages from a previous Swedish
National Test. Student participants had not been exposed to
the selected passages, but they were familiar with the question
format with such passages (i.e. listening to a speaker reading
one such passage and finding a person’s job described in the
passage). We considered that familiarity with the question
format would allow the speaker’s accents to be the main factor
affecting student listener’sperformancesandratings.The
other text comprised 40 true/false sentences adapted from
Munro and Derwing. (1995b) for its suitability for the
dictation test. Each of the 40 sentences contained three to
five highly frequent content words that were mostly verbs,
nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and one preposition (“through”in
the sentence “people eat through their noses”).
Each speaker read the two texts during a 30-min to 1-h
recording session in a soundproof studio. The session began
with the collection of the speaker’s demographic information and
their consent for participation, through a simple computer
survey. Before the recording, the speakers could rehearse and
practice as much as they wanted. The texts were identically
arranged for all speakers in a PowerPoint presentation: first
passages and then sentences (one passage/sentence per slide).
During the recording, the speakers were asked to read the texts as
naturally as possible, without slowing down or articulating too
much. They sometimes read the same sentence or passage twice
or more, voluntarily or upon request when necessary. The
readings were recorded via a RØDE NP-USB microphone and
the free software Audacity 2.4.0 (audacityteam.org) at a 44.1-kHz
sample rate and a 16-bit resolution.
After having recorded all six speakers, we created each passage
and sentence reading as a WAV file with a 0.5-s silence at the
beginning and end. We then selected six out of 10 passages and 20
out of 40 sentences by removing ambiguous passages and seeking
even numbers between true/false sentences (see the online
supplement). Eventually, we converted the selected WAV files
(i.e., six speaker’s readings of the same six passages and 20
sentences) into MP4 files, as WAV files were not possible to
embed in the tests that we created in MS forms.
Before moving on, we briefly discuss the importance of using
different speaker’s readings of the same texts for our study. Since
we examined the effect of different accents (i.e., pronunciation)
on student’s performances, perception, and attitudes, it was very
crucial to control “noise”factors possibly affecting test results,
such as individual speaker’s syntactic or lexical preferences.
Regarding the concern that text reading is too artificial to
represent real-life language use, it can be highlighted that
language use in the digital age largely involves listening to pre-
recorded and/or scripted speeches (i.e., text-reading).
Preparation of Online Testing
The main idea and dictation tests were created in Microsoft
Forms in which the speakers’readings in MP4 files were
embedded. In the main idea test, each of the six questions
contained one passage and multiple choice answers with one
correct answer, four distractors, and “I don’t know”as the last
TABLE 1 | Information about speaker participants.
L1 Home country Gender Age Job Years in
Sweden
How to use English
b
Mandarin China Male 28 Lecturer 8 Socializing, entertainment (e.g., traveling, gaming, or YouTubing), work (teaching,
researching, or studying)Russian/
Ukrainian
Ukraine Female 46 Lecturer 10
Tamil India Female 45 Lecturer 1
Lusoga/
Luganda
Uganda Female 41 Student
a
7
American
English
The US Male 40 Lecturer 22
British English The
United Kingdom
Male 56 Lecturer 29
Note.
a
Ugandan speaker had worked as a secondary school teacher using English as the instructional language before coming to Sweden.
b
All lecturer participants used English for teaching and the Ukrainian, American and British speakers sometimes taught in Swedish too.
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
option. In the dictation test, each of the 20 questions contained
one sentence and an empty box to type in the sentence.
As mentioned in Overview of the tests, both main idea and
dictation tests contained one listener comprehensibility (LC)
item, one accentedness perception (AP) item, and four
accented acceptance items (AA1, AA2, AA4 and AA4). All
these items had 9-point scales and were placed after the LI
questions. For LC, “1”meant “very easy to understand”and
“9”meant “very hard to understand”(Munro and Derwing,
1995a, and adapted by many studies). For AP, “1”meant “no
non-native accent at all”and “9”meant “very heavy foreign
accent”(Hansen Edwards et al., 2018). For AA1, “1”meant “the
accent was very pleasant to listen to”and “9”meant “the accent
was very annoying and irritating,”respectively (Szpyra-
Kozlowska, 2014). For AA2, “1”meant “no pronunciation
errors”and “9”meant “a lot of pronunciation errors.”; for
AA3, “1”meant “I like the accent very much”and “9”meant
“I do not like the accent at all.”; for AA4, “1”meant “the speaker
has a high level of education and a high-status job”and “9”meant
“the speaker has a low level of education and a low-status job”
(Sewell, 2012).
To remove training effect, the LI questions in both tests and
the multiple choices in each main idea question were set to
randomly appear to different students. We also counterbalanced
the main idea and dictation tests in the Google Blog we used as the
test platform, so that half of students in each group would do the
main idea test first while the other half would begin with the
dictation test. Together with the two tests, we also included a
follow-up survey requesting demographic information in the test
platform.
Listening Sessions
Each of seven classes with 22–30 students was administered a
listening session by the first and second authors. Although
students were sitting in a classroom, they took the tests
individually using their own laptops and headphones. We first
introduced the purpose of the study and instructed students to
listen to each passage and sentence only once, informing them
that they would remain anonymous to us and that assessing
individual performance was not our concern.
The following steps were made to randomly assign students
tested class by class into six listener groups. We asked listeners to
choose a paper from a box, which assigned them an ID and the
group they belonged to. The group names matched the page
names on the Google blog. Students were then given the blog
address from where they navigated to their own group pages and
then to the tests. All listener participants completed the two tests
and the follow-up survey within 20–30 min.
Crucially, students were not informed of the profiles and
language backgrounds of the speakers they listened to because
knowledge of the speakers could be a preconceptual factor
affecting listeners’test performances and ratings, as found by
numerous studies on L1 listener’s perceptions and attitudes
toward a speaker’s accent, using matched- or verbal-guize
techniques (see Lindemann and Subtirelu, 2013 for a survey of
such studies). This methodological decision was important to
examine listeners’perceptions and attitudes emerging from
listening to a speaker, as well as to observe whether, and to
what extent listeners appear to associate the accents that they hear
with their preconceptual knowledge of and attitudes toward
different accents.
Data Analysis
We examined listener intelligibility (LI), listener
comprehensibility (LC), accentedness perception (AP), and
accentedness acceptance (AA) separately for the main idea
and dictation tests, for which we reversed the LC and AA
ratings. To operationalize LI, we used the percentages of
correct answers from both main idea and dictation tests: for
the main idea, we took the percentage of correct answers against
the total number of questions, and for the dictation, we used the
mean percentage of the percentages of correctly dictated content
words against the total number of content words for the 20
sentences (Kennedy and Trofimovich, 2008). We accepted
typographical errors in the dictation test when it was clear
that the target word had been correctly understood (e.g.,
“gazoline”instead of “gasoline”and “excelent”in place of
“excellent”in the phrase, “Gasoline is an excellent drink”). As
the ratings of LC and AP were completed once after the main idea
test and once after the dictation test, we used the ratings as they
were to operationalize the constructs. As for the four AA ratings,
the inter-rater reliability of the four was as high as 0.812 for the
main idea and 0.802 for the dictation; thus, the AA ratings in each
test were produced by averaging the four ratings.
After identifying that the data did not have normal
distribution, we performed robust ANOVAs and pairwise tests
with 20% trimmed means in the R WRS2 Package (Wilcox and
Schönbrodt, 2015) and non-parametric correlation tests in SPSS
to obtain valid statistics and the power of normal distribution, as
suggested by Conover. (1999),Larson-Hall. (2015),Mair and
Wilcox. (2019), and Turner. (2014). The WRS2 Package does not
provide effect sizes for factorial ANOVAs. Thus, partial eta
squared effect sizes (η
p2
) for group comparisons via ANOVAs
were calculated separately with F values and degrees of freedom
based on 20% trimmed mean observations, using the formula in
Norouzian and Plonsky. (2018).
To answer the first research question, robust two-way
ANOVAs were performed to determine group effect (main,
controlled effect of the speaker’s accents) and grade effect on
LI, LC, AP, and AA, as well as group-grade interaction (see the
last paragraph of Listeners for the reason for involving English
grade as a factor). When a significant main effect was determined,
pairwise between-group tests were conducted. Further, robust
mixed ANOVAs were performed to ascertain whether the LC, AP
and AA ratings in the main idea and dictation tests were
consistently done by individual students. To address the
second research question regarding the relationships among
LI, LC, AP, and AA, non-parametric partial correlation tests
were performed, controlling for English grade that occasionally
interacted with main group effect.
Our data is available as an excel file in the online supplement,
including the mean values, standard deviations, and medians of
groups for each test construct as well as test values, confidence
intervals and p-values of pairwise post hoc tests.
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
RESULTS
Listener intelligibility, Listener
Comprehensibility, Accentedness
Perception, and Accentedness Acceptance
for Six Different Speaker Accents
This section reports the findings that address the first research
question (see Aim and research questions). Figures 1–4present
descriptive statistics for LI, LC, AP, and AA for the six listener
groups, as well as group and English grade interaction plots.
Table 1 shows the outcomes of robust 2-way ANOVAs for group
effect on LI, LC, AP, and AA and pairwise post hoc tests. As
reported in Listening sessions, the listeners were not informed of
the speaker’s nationalities or L1s.
First, for the listener intelligibility (LI) tests, it should be
considered that the scores for the main idea and dictation
tests were incompatible. Thus, score differences for the main
idea test of six questions and for the dictation test of 20 questions,
presented in Figure 1, should be understood in considering the
nature of the tests. As seen in Table 2, there was no group
difference in the main idea test, indicating that all groups
performed similarly in understanding their own speakers.
However, a difference appeared in the dictation test:
F (5, 84) 141.31, p0.001, η
p2
0.89. The post hoc tests
indicated that, overall, those listening to the American, British,
and Indian speakers performed better than those listening to the
Chinese, Ugandan, and Ukrainian speakers, and those listening to
the American speaker performed significantly better than those
listening to the Indian speaker (see Table 2). The effect of English
grades was significant for both the main idea LI: F (1, 84) 40.97,
p0.001, η
p2
0.32. and the dictation LI: F (1, 84) 46.18, p
0.001, η
p2
0.35, revealing high-grade students performed better
than low-grade students in all groups for both main idea and
diction tests. However, interaction between group and grade was
identified only among the dictation scores: F (5, 84) 34.22, p
0.002, η
p2
67. This group-grade interaction in the dictation test
indicates two things as seen in Figure 1. First, low-grade students
in the Ukrainian speaker’s listener group performed much more
poorly than high-grade ones in the same group and low-grade
ones in the other groups. Second, low-grade students in the
Indian speaker’s listener group performed better than low-
grade ones in the other groups, and even better than high-
grade ones listening to the Ukrainian and Ugandan speakers.
FIGURE 1 | Listener intelligibility groups (left) and groups*English grades (right) plots using 20% trimmed means and standard errors: Note. Subject numbers are:
Ch 23 (high 10 and low 13), Uk 26 (high 17 and low 9), In 27 (high 24 and low 3), Ug 29 (high 14 and low 15), Am 26 (high 20 and low 6),
Br 29 (high 19 and low 10).
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
Second, we looked at the listener comprehensibility (LC)
rating, which was about feeling easy or difficult about a
speaker’s accent. All speakers received statistically similar
LC ratings after the main idea test, but after the dictation
test, group effect appeared: F (5, 84) 19.34, p0.03, η
p2
0.53. The American and British speakers were rated more
highly than the Ugandan speaker but not more highly than the
other three speakers (see Table 2). No significant effect of
grade on the two LC ratings was observed. However, some
interesting information about the LC ratings by high- and
low-grade students emerged from the significant group-grade
interaction in the second LC rating: F (5, 84) 16.79, p
0.042, η
p2
0.5, se well as in the descriptive statistics in
Figure 2 provide. Centrally, high-grade students listening to
the Ugandan speaker felt her accent difficult more than low-
grade ones in the same group, although the high-grade
students’LI scores (i.e., actual understanding) were
significantly higher than the low-grade student’s scores.
Meanwhile, contrary to the evident discrepancy in high-
and low-grade student’sLIscoresfortheUkrainian
speaker, the difference between theses high- and low-grade
student’s own LC ratings for the speaker was very small,
indicating that their subjective feeling about the speaker’s
accent was not strongly connected to their actual listening
ability. In addition, the LC rating after the dictation test was
significantly higher than the LC rating after the main idea test:
F (1, 27.91) 9.59, p0.0044, η
p2
0.25, revealing rather
inconsistent ratings by individual listeners after they listened
to the same speakers during the main idea and dictation tests.
Third, the accentedness perception (AP) rating was about
the degree to which the listener perceives an accent as native
or foreign. Statistics in both Figure 3 and Table 2 indicate that
significant group differences were found in AP ratings after
both main idea test: F (5, 84) 112.88, p0.001, η
p2
0.87
and dictation test: F (5, 84) 23.88, p0.016, η
p2
0.58.
Students who listened to the Indian speaker perceived
accentedness more than other speakers’listeners. The
American and British speakers’listeners rated these
speakers the lowest. While no English grade effect was
found, there was group-grade interaction among the AP
FIGURE 2 | Listener comprehensibility groups (left) and groups*English grades (right) plots using 20% trimmed means and standard errors: Note. Subject
numbers are: Ch 23 (high 10 and low 13), Uk 26 (high 17 and low 9), In 27 (high 24 and low 3), Ug 29 (high 14 and low 15), Am 26 (high 20 and
low 6), Br 29 (high 19 and low 10).
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
ratings both after the main idea: F (5, 84) 31.57, p0.002,
η
p2
0.65, and dictation tests: F (5, 84) 28.91, p0.007, η
p2
0.63. Evidently, high-grade students in all groups reacted
more sensitively to the speakers’accentedness than low-
grade students. There was no within-subject difference for
the AP ratings, and no interaction with the group effect was
found either, meaning that the AP ratings in the main idea and
diction tests were consistent.
Finally, the accentedness acceptance (AA) rating was to
measure the degrees to which student’s attitudes were positive
or negative toward their speakers. The results revealed significant
group effects after both main idea test: F (5, 84) 25.11, p0.006,
η
p2
0.59 and dictation test: F (5, 84) 21.77, p0.015, η
p2
0.56. The American and British speakers were significantly more
accepted by their listener groups than the speakers of other
groups (see Figure 4 and Table 2). The AA ratings for the
American and British speakers were significantly more positive
than the ratings for the Chinese, Ukrainian, and Indian speakers
after both the main idea and dictation tests, and for the Ugandan
speaker after the dictation test. No group-grade interaction was
found; however, Figure 4 shows that the overall trend of the AA
rating was clearer among the high-grade students. Again, neither
a within-subject difference for the AA ratings for the tasks nor an
interaction with the main group effect was found, indicating
consistent ratings.
Relationships Among Listener Intelligibility,
Listener Comprehensibility, Accentedness
Perception, and Accentedness Acceptance
To answer the second research question (see Aim and research
questions), we examined the relationships among LI, LC, AP, and
AA for the six speaker’s listener groups, through partial non-
parametric (Spearman) correlations tests (Conover, 1999),
controlling for English grade, which sometimes interacted with
the group effect (see Table 3).
LI (actual understanding) and LC (feeling of ease or difficulty)
had a moderate positive correlation only among the Ukrainian
and Indian speaker’s listeners for the main idea test; otherwise, no
correlation between the two constructs was observed. This means
that subjective feeling about an accent, whether to be easy or
difficult, was not a strong indicator for student listener’s actual
FIGURE 3 | Accentedness perception groups (left) and groups*English grades (right) plots using 20% trimmed means and standard errors: Note. Subject
numbers are: Ch 23 (high 10 and low 13), Uk 26 (high 17 and low 9), In 27 (high 24 and low 3), Ug 29 (high 14 and low 15), Am 26 (high 20 and
low 6), Br 29 (high 19 and low 10).
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
FIGURE 4 | Accentedness acceptance groups (left) and groups*English grades (right) plots using 20% trimmed means and standard errors: Note. Subject
numbers are: Ch 23 (high 10 and low 13), Uk 26 (high 17 and low 9), In 27 (high 24 and low 3), Ug 29 (high 14 and low 15), Am 26 (high 20 and
low 6), Br 29 (high 19 and low 10).
TABLE 2 | Outcomes of robust two-way ANOVAs for group difference in listener intelligibility (LI), listener comprehensibility (LC), accentedness perception (AP), and
accentedness acceptance (AA) and pairwise post hoc tests (N 160).
F-values p-values Effect sizes (η
p2
)Post hoc (p<0.01)
LI Main idea test 16.73 0.043
a
0.49
Dictation dets 141.31 0.001** 0.89 Am >In >Ch, UK, Ug
Br >Ch, UK, Ug
LC After main idea test 15.23 0.059 0.47
After dictation test 19.34 0.003* 0.53 Am, Br >Ug
AP After main idea test 112.88 0.001** 0.87 In >Ch, Ug >Am, Br
UK >Am, Br
After dictation test 23.88 0.016** 0.58 In >Ch >Br
UK, In, Ug >Am, Br
AA After main idea test 25.11 0.006** 0.59 Am, Br >Ch, UK, In
After dictation test 21.77 0.015** 0.56 Am, Br >Ch, UK, In, Ug
Note. Ch, Chinese speaker; Uk, Ukrainian speaker; In, Indian speaker; Ug, Ugandan speaker; Am, American speaker; Br, British speaker; Ch 23, Uk 26, In 27, Ug 29, Am 26,
Br 29.
df1 5 and df2 84 for all eight robust ANOVA based on 20% trimmed means observations.
*p <.05.,
**
p<.01. For post hoc tests p-value lower than .01 were accepted through Bonferroni Corrections.
a
The p-value appeared significant but no significant difference was found from the post hoc tests.
The WRS Package does not calculate effect sizes for factorial ANOVAs and partial eta-squared effect sizes were calculated with the formula by Norouzian and Plonsky. (2018).
The data excel file in the online supplementary material includes the mean values, standard deviations, and medians of groups for each test construct and detailed information for pairwise
post hoc tests.
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
listening comprehension or understanding of the speaker’s
accents. This was in fact manifested when we observed the LC
ratings by the Ugandan and Ukrainian speaker’s listeners in view
of their performances for the dictation LI tests (see Listener
intelligibility (LI), listener comprehensibility (LC), accentedness
perception (AP), 437 and accentedness acceptance (AA) for six
different speaker accents). In addition, LI was also not correlated
with either AP (degrees of perception of an accent as native or
foreign) or AA (degrees to which the listener is positive or
negative toward an accent) in any group. This means that
student’s perceptions of and attitudes toward the speaker’s
accents were independent of their abilities to understand the
speakers.
On the other hand, either a moderate or highly negative
correlation between LC and AP was found among the listeners
of the Chinese, Ugandan, American, and British speakers for the
main idea test, as well as a very strong negative correlation among
the American speaker’s listeners for the dictation test. Thus,
student participant’s feeling of ease or difficulty with their
speakers seems to be strongly connected to the degrees to
which the speaker’s accents were perceived as native. LC was
also positively correlated with AA among most groups except for
the Indian speaker’s listener group, indicating that students
seemed to accept the accents which they felt easy. In addition,
there was a negative correlation between AP and AA among all
groups, indicating that when they perceived foreignness or non-
nativeness in an accent, listeners were less likely to accept it, and
vice versa.
The relationships (or no relationships) among LI, LC, AP, and
AA, altogether, indicate that perceived nativeness seemed to be a
crucial factor for students to judge whether their speakers were
easy to understand and whether their accents were acceptable, to
which, however, their actual understandings of the same speakers
did not have much relevance.
DISCUSSION
Discussion of the Results
We sought to address two research questions regarding Swedish
youths as listeners to speakers of Global Englishes. First, we
investigated upper secondary school student’s listening ability
(LI), feeling of ease or difficulty (LC), perception of nativeness or
foreignness (AP), and negative or positive attitude (AA) toward
the diverse accents of six English speakers, by comparing the
listener groups of six different speakers. In doing so, we also
observed the effect of English grade on the student’s performance,
perception, and attitude as well as the interaction between group
and grade effects. Second, we examined the relationships among
LI, LC, AP, and AA of each of the six speaker’s listener groups,
controlling for grade. Key results are discussed below in view of
previous studies.
Regarding student’s listener intelligibility (LI), our finding is
aligned with the finding by Kang et al. (2018) that American and
British speakers were consistently better understood than all
speakers with other English accents. This was, in fact,
predicted, given the great influence of popular culture from
TABLE 3 | Significant non-parametric partial correlations among listener intelligibility (LI), listener comprehensibility (LC), accentedness perception (AP), and accentedness acceptance (AA) of six listener groups when
controlling for grades.
LI ×LC LI ×AP LI ×AA LC ×AP LC ×AA AP ×AA
Main idea Dictation Main idea Dictation Main idea Dictation Main idea Dictation Main idea Dictation Main idea Dictation
Listener group Ch —————−0.433* —0.472* 0.577** —−0.433*
UK 0.557** ———————0.687** —−0.595** —
In 0.515** —————————−0.598** —
Ug ——————−0.738** —0.415* ——−0.437*
Am ——————−0.681** −0.900** 0.494* 0.604** −0.820** −0.741**
Br ——————−0.499** —0.613** 0.553** −0.717** −0.624**
Note. Information is organized into “group: coefficient (p-value)”:Ch(df20); Uk (df 23); In (df 24); Ug (df 26); Am (df 23); Br (df 26).
*p <.05.,**p <.01.
Ch, Chinese speaker; Uk, Ukrainian speaker; In, Indian speaker; Ug, Ugandan speaker; Am, American speaker; Br, British speaker.
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
English-speaking countries (particularly the United States) on the
Swedish youth (Cabau, 2009;Henry et al., 2019), as well as the
general tendency to focus strongly on GA and RP accents during
the teaching of listening in instructional settings (Sung, 2016;
Alonso-Herrero and Lasagabaster Herrarte, 2019;Tsang, 2019),
including the English education in Swedish schools (see Henry
et al., 2018;Mohr et al., 2019).
On the other hand, considering that some of their non-
American/British speaker participants in Kang et al. (2018)
were better understood than other speakers from the same
varieties, the significant differences in dictation scores among
students who listened to the Chinese, Ukrainian, Indian, and
Ugandan speakers in our study may not be generalizable. The
differences in the LI scores among students listening to the
Chinese, Ukrainian, Indian, and Ugandan speakers may
simply indicate our student participant’s understanding of the
four individual speakers, rather than their understanding of the
whole population of the English varieties that the speakers belong
to. The result may have differed if we had included multiple other
speakers from the same varieties.
Additionally, the finding that there was no significant
difference among the six listener group’s main idea scores was
somewhat unexpected. This outcome may signal that Swedish
youths possess listening comprehension to understand diverse
English accents when hearing every detail is not necessary.
Alternatively, it may have been that their familiarity with the
format of the national English test allowed students to guess right
answers, whether they fully understood their speakers or whether
they only understood key information for answering the
questions. The outcome attached to the main idea LI should
be further scrutinized to establish a plausible conclusion, for
which a more rigorous test method should be identified through
piloting different test designs.
As for LC, feeling easy or difficult about an accent, the ratings
were in favor of the American and British speakers although a
statistical difference was found only between the students who
listened to the American and British speakers on one side and
those who listened to the Ugandan speaker on the other. While
AP (perception) and AA (attitude) ratings were consistent for
both main idea and dictation tests, inconsistency was found in LC
ratings, as visible in Figure 2. According to Thomson. (2018)
review of L2 pronunciation research, actual understanding (LI)
and subjective feeling of ease or difficulty (LC) tend to have a
close relationship. However, our data did not clearly show such a
trend between LI and LC, while as seen in Table 2, our listener’s
LC tended to have more relationships with perceived nativeness
or foreignness (AP) and attitude (AA).
Particularly, the correlation between the LC and AP of the
American speaker’s listeners was outstandingly strong. This
seems to be simply because Swedish youths are extensively
exposed to the variety (Cabau, 2009). That is, the students
seemed to rate their speaker as being native through
recognizing his American accent features that they had
extensively heard, and also as being easy, as the level of
familiarity is known to play an important role in feeling easy
or comfortable with an accent (Gass and Varonis, 1984;Isaacs
and Trofimovich, 2012). Interestingly, however, neither their LC
nor their AP was corelated to their actual understanding (LI) of
the American speaker. In fact, similar to the American speaker’s
listener group, all other listener group’s LC ratings for their own
speakers were usually not correlated, or had only a weak
correlation with their listener intelligibility. This finding about
LI and LC is aligned with the findings of Kim. (2008),Matsuura.
(2007), and Matsuura et al. (1999), where L2 listener’s
intelligibility and comprehensibility often did not have strong
correlations. Together their and our findings raise the question
that, besides familiarity, other factors might come into play in
student’s LC ratings, such as “their notions or conceptions of the
value of the speaker’s accent”(Ballard and Winke, 2017, p. 214;
Lindemann, 2017), or Standard Language Ideology (i.e., the belief
system of ‘correct’language forms) that they have internalized
through school education and media exposure (Jansen et al., in
press).
Moreover, our results about AP (i.e., perception of an accent)
and AA (i.e., attitude toward the accent), largely confirmed the
findings of previous studies. First, the AP ratings were most
consistent among the four constructs in both main idea and
dictation tests, such that the accents of the American and British
speakers were highly perceived as “native”while other speaker’s
accents highly as “foreign”(Kim, 2008;Ballard and Winke, 2017).
This tendency was much more evident among high-grade
students than low-grade ones, which was also observed by
Goh. (1999) and Harding. (2008). Taken together, both their
and our findings indicate that proficient listeners who are capable
of recognizing different accents tend to be more biased in their
attitudes toward the accents they label as native or non-native.
Although we cannot be certain how many students recognized
their speaker’s accents correctly, our finding about the AP ratings
for the Indian, American, and British speakers seems to be
comparable with McKenzie et al. (2019), in which Thai L1
university students tended to identify Indian, American, and
British accents more correctly than other accent varieties, due
to the “socio-psychological salience”of the three varieties (p. 14),
that is, due to them being “prominent and frequently heard in the
media”(p. 2). In both McKenzie et al. and our study, a
recognition of American and British accents appeared to result
in positive attitudes toward the speakers of the two accents,
whereas a recognition of Indian accent seemed to lead the
speakers with the accent to be judged slightly negatively. The
possible salience of the Indian speaker’s accent to her listeners in
our study may also be a reason for her listener’s relatively high LI,
whereas just one of the three Indian speakers in Kang et al. (2018)
was significantly better understood than speakers from other
varieties.
Further, while the AP ratings for the Indian speaker was higher
than the AP for the Chinese, Ukrainian, and Ugandan speakers,
there was no statistical difference in the AA (i.e., attitude) of their
listeners. There was a 50% chance of a moderate negative
correlation between the AP and AA ratings for these four
speakers, whereas there was always a strong negative
correlation between the AP and AA ratings for the American
and British speakers. Therefore, students were not very negative
toward the speakers perceived to be foreign, but they were clearly
positive toward the speakers perceived to be native, particularly
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Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
toward the American speaker whose variety features seemed to be
highly noticed by his listeners. These findings confirm that the
accent preference of Swedish youths is skewed toward that of
American English (Cabau, 2009;Norrby, 2015), which is a
common tendency found among learners in other contexts
(Sung, 2016;Tsang, 2019). In addition, for all six speakers,
neither AP nor AA was correlated with LI. This was
somewhat puzzling for us for a while as a close relationship
between attitudes and actual understanding has been reported in
the extant literature (e.g., Lindemann, 2002;Lindemann and
Subtirelu, 2013). Apparently, as speculated earlier, students
involved certain preconceived values, such as Standard
Language Ideology, in perceiving and evaluating their speakers’
accents (Ballard & Winke, 2017;Lindemann, 2017), for which the
question of whether they could understand the speakers did not
seem to be counted much. This finding probably needs to be
addressed separately from the result about their listener
intelligibility, which informs that Swedish youth listeners in
our study had poorer understanding of non-American/British.
Implications for English Language
Education
To recapitulate, the results showed that the intelligibility scores
and perception/attitude ratings of participants favored the two
speakers with privileged accents–the American and British
speakers. However, across all six listener groups, no
correlation was detected between their actual understanding of
the speakers and their perception/attitude ratings, which often
had a strong correlation with their feelings of ease/difficulty
regarding the speaker’s accents.
Overall, our results suggest the need for pedagogical
intervention involving curriculum innovation for English
language teaching at school (Matsuda, 2018;Rose et al., 2020).
First, students need to be guided to improve their actual
understanding and sense of familiarity with Global English
speakers besides the native accents that they prefer. Without a
doubt, understanding a speaker requires different abilities, not
least decoding phonetic/phonological signals, comprehending the
meaning of the decoded utterances, and interpreting pragmatic
meaning behind uttered meaning (Rost, 2011), where meaning-
negotiating strategies also play a role. Therefore, endeavors to
help learners become effective international communicators
should involve fostering all levels of linguistic abilities as well
as pragmatic strategies as suggested by Lee and Drajati (2019),
Sifakis et al. (2020). However, based on our results, and given that
much of communication breakdown in the context of English as a
contact language is caused at the level of phonological decoding
(see Deterding, 2013;Kim and Billington, 2016 for example), we
wish to highlight the importance of training learners to
understand different accents, which the concept of LI
encapsulates. Here we add some empirical reports that suggest
that increasing learner’s listener intelligibility for diverse Global
Englishes accents through training is doable. For example, several
studied report that exposure to multiple speakers of an English
accent variety resulted in improved understanding of unfamiliar
speakers from the same variety (e.g., Bradlow and Bent, 2008;
Lindemann et al., 2016). Listening to speakers of multiple
varieties of English has even led to better understanding of an
unfamiliar international variety (Baese-Berk et al., 2013).
Moreover, exposure to speakers with diverse accents can help
listeners develop listening strategies, such as focusing on general
and relevant cues to understanding an accent, while not being
distracted by irrelevant variation (Xie and Myers, 2017).
Apart from perceptual training for improving listener
intelligibility, innovative pedagogical work should be
undertaken to improve Swedish youth’s perceptions and
attitudes and prepare them to become open-minded toward
diverse English speakers. As our results indicate, an increased
understanding of the accents of certain English speaker groups
may not automatically stimulate positive attitudes toward them.
However, research reports interaction between the listener’s
comprehension of and attitude/belief about a certain accent in
both positive and negative ways (Lindemann and Subtirelu,
2013), and if attitudes are mediated by some other pedagogical
interventions having a good understanding of an accent can
possibly strengthen positive attitudes, and vice versa. Such
interventions can include activities for problematizing
Standard Language Ideology that prescribes “standard”or
“correct forms”of English (Jansen et al., in press), as well as
for developing awareness and knowledge of the globalized
English reality (Rose and Galloway, 2019).
Moreover, we suggest that the English national test should be
more aligned to the global perspective of the national English
syllabus, realizing that the focus on native norms in testing has
been the major hinderance to innovative teaching practice (Rose
and Galloway, 2019); that is, in the listening section of the test, a
greater variety of accents should be included to “achieve greater
authenticity”of globalized situations and to “create positive
washback”(Harding, 2008,p.3,p.3).
As discussed earlier, the Swedish national English syllabus for
upper secondary school promotes a global perspective, stating,
“[k]nowledge of English increases the individual’s opportunities
to participate in different social and cultural contexts, as well as in
global studies and working life”(Swedish National Agency for
Education, 2011, p. 1). This is an appropriate measure and
response to the fact that the Swedish use English as an
international communication tool. Such a need is increasing
even within the country, where the implementation of the
Bologna Process has brought a great number of international
teachers and students to the country. In fact, the six speakers who
participated in our study represent the type of international
interlocutors that Swedish youths will encounter within the
country. We suggest that school teachers consider a wider
interpretation of the recommendation of the syllabus that “[t]
eaching should make sure of the surrounding world as a resource
for contacts, information and learning”(Swedish National
Agency for Education, 2011, p. 1) and apply the idea to
curriculum innovation (Rose et al., 2020).
Limitations
In our study, we attempted to ensure the meaningfulness and
generalizability of the statistical results by employing several
methodological strategies, including random group assignment
Frontiers in Education | www.frontiersin.org June 2021 | Volume 6 | Article 65190814
Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
of listeners, who were tested class by class, and robust inferential
tests. Nevertheless, we are aware of the limitations of our results
that we consider. First, the speakers, although selected from
different varieties to include Global Englishes speakers with
diverse accents, were not considered to represent their own
varieties. Thus, for example, the Swedish learner’s listening
performances and attitudes toward speaker’s accents should
not be overinterpreted as their understanding of and attitudes
toward the whole populations of the English varieties that our
speaker participants belong to. In addition, the one-time
measurement of LC, AP and AA after the main idea and
dictation tests represents a limitation of this research, which
should be considered in understanding our results. Moreover,
there were several variables we could not control or check their
effects on the listener’s performances and ratings, including
speaker’s gender or their voice qualities, and interaction
between speech and listener gender. We therefore suggest to
readers that they consider these uncontrolled variables when
critically examining the results of our study.
CONCLUSION
This study investigated Swedish upper secondary student’s
listener intelligibility (LI), listener comprehensibility (LC),
accentedness perception (AP), and accentedness acceptance
(AA) of Global Englishes speakers with diverse accents. The
results suggest that Swedish youths share the known
tendencies of L2 learners and users of English: they better
understand (e.g., Kang et al., 2018) and favor privileged
accents over other English accents (e.g., Sung, 2016;Tsang,
2019). Our study, therefore, highlights the need to help
Swedish youths and other English learners widen their view of
English as a global contact language and its speakers, maximize
their listening proficiency, and, thus, be ready for globalized
English use (Morrison and White, 2005;Rose et al., 2020).
Moreover, we believe that our study is of methodological
significance, by extending the use of the concepts of
intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness from
assessing L2 speakers to determining L2 listener’s abilities with
and perceptions of diverse English accents, thereby suggesting
pedagogical intervention for learners as listeners rather than
speakers.
In future research, detailed examinations of phonological
features that affect Swedish youth’s LI should be conducted to
identify areas to be included in the curriculum for teaching
listening proficiency with diverse accents. We also
recommend classroom practice studies that document the
process through which school education helps improve
learner’s listener intelligibility (LI), listener
comprehensibility (LC), accentedness perception (AP), and
accentedness acceptance (AA) for Global Englishes users (also
see Rose et al., 2020 for discussions related to this
recommendation). Such studies can also examine whether
positive contacts with and exposure to different English
speaker groups help students to become unbiased
(Subtirelu and Lindemann, 2016) and even mediate their
attitudes to have more positive, straightforward
correlations with actual understanding. Further, to attest
the current results, we suggest more studies that
operationalize the constructs of LI, LC, AP, and AA, with
other speaker and listener combinations as well as employing
various research techniques for triangulation, such as eliciting
attitudes through a mixed method approach (e.g., Cameron
and Galloway, 2019) or observing interaction between the
listener’sfourconstructsandthespeaker’s accommodation
skills in an interactional context.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The original contributions presented in the study are included in
the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be
directed to the corresponding author.
ETHICS STATEMENT
Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on
human participants in accordance with the local legislation
and institutional requirements. The participants provided
their informed consent to participate in this study through
the voluntary online submission of their answers as the
authors requested.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
The first author made most contribution to the design of the
study and data analysis, as well as to completing the manuscript.
All the three authors worked together to produce testing
materials, and the first and second authors collected data. All
authors approved the work for publication.
FUNDING
The study was internally funded by University West Research in
Children and Youths.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are very grateful to the reviewers of our manuscript, our speaker
and listener participants, the teachers who helped us with listener
recruitment, and Professor Emma Sorbring at University West, who
believed in and supported our study (Jeong et al., 2021).
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.651908/
full#supplementary-material
Frontiers in Education | www.frontiersin.org June 2021 | Volume 6 | Article 65190815
Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
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Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a
potential conflict of interest.
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Frontiers in Education | www.frontiersin.org June 2021 | Volume 6 | Article 65190817
Jeong et al. Swedish Youth Global Englishes Listeners
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