DETERMINING THE INFLUENCE OF ATTITUDE TOWARD TEACHER’S ACCENTS ON LANGUAGE LEARNING

The current study examined the influence of a teacher’s accent on language learning. Students often make judgments about a teacher based on the teacher’s accent. These judgments either motivate or demotivate a student from learning language. This study seeks to determine how attitudes held by students towards accents employed by teacher’s influence language learning. To achieve this aim, the Matched-Guise methodology was used with a questionnaire. The following conclusions were drawn: (a) there is a relationship between accented speech and learners attitudes; (b) learners form a definite opinion about a teacher based on their accent; and (c) learners prefer to be taught by people who have certain accents based on their notion of a Standard English language accent. The spontaneous attitudes reflected by the participants do reveal that students generally hold some level of prejudice against speakers who have a strong accent in their speech.