Attitudes towards World Englishes and Accent Discrimination in the Italian School System

According to Kachru (1992) the global spread of English can be synthetised in a model with three concentric circles: the inner circle (e.g. UK, US), where English is the dominant mother tongue; the outer circle (e.g. India, Nigeria), where English is used as a second language in official contexts; and the expanding circle (e.g. China, Japan), where English is learned as a foreign language. This framework has influenced the teaching of English by emphasising the importance of exposing students to different varieties of World English,es rather than focusing solely on Standard English (Kachru 1992; Seargeant, Swann 2012; Matsuda 2003, 2013). The phenomenon of World Englishes and its implications have been addressed several times; however, the question of social acceptance of non-standard varieties by teachers and students remains open (Lippi-Green 2012). This study aims at exploring possible discrimination of World Englishes accents among Italian secondary school students. 80 questionnaires were collected in two different Italian cities in the framework of a verbal guise experimental design, where students were asked to judge and rate different voices of students and teachers of English reading the same passage from a schoolbook. The following accents of English were used in the verbal guise experiments: four accents from the Inner Circle (Standard American; Standard British; African American; Multicultural London English), two from the Outer Circle (Indian; Nigerian), three from the expanding Circle (Italian; Chinese; Ukrainian). Participants were presented 9 different audio stimuli of male and female voices reading an excerpt of a school manual, with different contextualisation (teachers/students). After listening to each stimulus, participants were requested to express their agreement on a 5-point Likert scale regarding a set of adjectives describing the person just heard. To assess attitudes towards different accents the Stereotype Content Model (SCM, Fiske et al. 2002) was adopted. According to SCM, the two dimensions of competence and warmth organize the perception of social groups and individual. The dimension of competence is related to the perceived status, whereas the warmth dimension is related to solidarity (Conte & Plutchik 1981). Nine adjectives were used, six for each of the competence and warmth dimension, three for the speech traits dimensions. It was then requested to guess the provenance of the speaker. This experiment aims at testing three research questions. We hypothesise that i) British English will be favoured for competence and American English for solidarity, whereas outer- and expanding circle varieties will be downgraded in comparison and perceived negatively. We then hypothesise that ii) Italian English accent will be perceived negatively for competence, but positively for solidarity. Finally, we predict that iii) students will be more critical towards teachers on the competence dimensions and, conversely, they will be more critical towards peers on the solidarity dimension.