558 Japanese university students' attitudes towards six varieties of English speech

What is it about?

This paper students investigated the attitudes of 558 Japanese university students towards forms of US, UK/Scottish and US English speech through the employment of 6 speech samples (verbal‐guise study) as well as map-task techniques (perceptual dialectology). Although the results suggest a particularly favourable attitude towards standard and non‐standard varieties of UK and US English in terms of ‘status’, informants expressed greater ‘solidarity’ with a Japanese speaker of heavily‐accented English. Differences in the students’ gender, self‐perceived proficiency in English, exposure to English and evaluations of varieties of Japanese all had significant effects on participants attitudes. The findings are discussed in relation to the educational and language policy implications in English language teaching inside and outside Japan.

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Why is it important?

In contrast to the findings of equivalent studies involving Japanese learners of English, where speech evaluations of English were assumed to be unidimensional, the results of the present study demonstrated that the informants’ ratings of speakers of varieties of English speech tend to be complex and are often contradictory. If this is indeed the case, and given the social context in Japan, with the increasing power of the English‐language media and rising importance of English in the country generally, it is vital that those concerned with English‐language education in Japan are made aware of the general complexity of learners’ attitudes towards social and regional variation in English, and that these attitudes are taken into account. This may be particularly the case for language planners and educators in Japan with respect to curriculum design, teacher recruitment and the specific choice of linguistic model(s) employed in English language classrooms. In the case of the latter, the results seemed to suggest that if ‘status’ (i.e. competence) were the overriding factor, then varieties of US English may be likely candidates as linguistic models. In contrast, the results also indicated that if ‘solidarity’ (i.e. social attractiveness) were the determining factor, then heavily‐accented Japanese English or non‐standard varieties of UK/US English might be more appropriate models for Japanese learners of English. It should be borne in mind, however, that learners themselves are active agents in deciding the target language variety and hence will actively choose whether – and, if so, to what extent – to give precedence to notions of prestige or solidarity when making such choices. Educators should also be aware of the clear differentiation between models of English as ‘points of reference’ rather than ‘norms of use’ when selecting forms of English speech in the language classroom.