The Swedish youth have received recognition for having high proficiency in English and for being highly motivated in learning English (Norrby, 2015). However, their accent preference and listening input are skewed towards certain Inner Circle Englishes, especially American English (AE) (Cabau, 2009), while it is not known if they are willing and/or capable of understanding a wide range of accents in globalised communication. Our study, to be commenced in early 2020, seeks to address this gap by investigating how Swedish youths are as listeners for diverse English accents. In this poster presentation, we will discuss the method of our study.

The method is experimental. We operationalise listener intelligibility (LI), listener comprehensibility (LC), accentedness perception (AP) and accentedness acceptance (AA), adapted from previous studies (e.g. Kennedy & Trofimovich, 2008; Munro & Derwing, 1995; Tulaja, 2019), as well as listener variables found to have influence on the listener perception (e.g. Kang & Rubin, 2014). The stimulus will be the recordings of five university lecturers (one AE L1 and four L2 speakers) reading the same texts – adapted from previous Swedish national English 6 tests and the 40 true/false sentences from Munro and Derwing (1995). Listeners will be five classes of high school students, and each class will listen to one of the five speakers’ readings. We will administer tests to determine LI, LC, AP, and AA, and a questionnaire to identify individual variables. The analysis will target the LI, LC, AP and AA for different speakers, their relationships, interaction between the effects of speakers and listener variables, and speakers’ phonetic features compromising LI. At this stage of the research process, we welcome feedback, particularly on the justification of speaker selection, instruments for measuring the four constructs and for identifying individual variables and ways to remove training effect in test administration.    

References

Cabau, B. (2009). The irresistible rise and hegemony of a linguistic fortress: English teaching in Sweden. International Multilingual Research Journal, 3(2), 134-152. doi:10.1080/19313150903073786

Kang, O., & Rubin, D. (2014). Listener expectations, reverse linguisticstereotyping, and individual background factors in social judgments and oral performance assessment. In A. Moyer & J. M. Levis (Eds.), Social dynamics in second language accent account (pp. 239-253). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Kennedy, S., & Trofimovich, P. (2008). Intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness of L2 speech: The role of listener experience and semantic context. Canadian Modern Language Review, 64(3), 459-489.

Munro, M., & Derwing, T. (1995). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning, 45(1), 73-97. doi:10.1111/j.1467-1770.1995.tb00963.x

Norrby, C. (2015). English in Scandinavia: Monster or mate? Sweden as a case study. In J. Hajek & Y. Slaughter (Eds.), Challenging the monolingual mindset (pp. 17-32). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Tulaja, L. (2019). Pronunciation errors by German L2 Danish learners: Ratings in accentedness, comprehensibility and acceptability. Paper presented at the The New Sounds, Waseda, Japan.

There is a longstanding belief that critical thinking is exclusively embedded in the Western Anglo-Saxon culture and language, thereby non-Western students using English as an additional language may not be capable of critical thinking (e.g., Atkinson, 1997). This paper reports on a study that questions this belief. The study explored the accounts of eight non-Western, international doctoral students at a New Zealand university and also analyzed their academic texts. The data of the study suggested that criticality or critical thinking was found in these students' verbal accounts. What they appeared to struggle was to express their critical thinking academically. This paper argues that, unlike the claim, non-Western students should learn critical thinking itself in the course of learning English; they may need to develop skills to communicate their critical thinking effectively in the English-medium academic context.

Workplaces are becoming increasingly international. In many contemporary workplaces, English is used as a lingua franca (ELF). This chapter introduces the notion of WELF, Workplace English as a Lingua Franca, which is used as a means of conceptualizing English that is used in international workplace settings. The chapter focuses on the language skills and strategies that are deployed by successful WELF users. An important aim in conceptualizing WELF is to help English learners to find their own answers to the questions of why they need to learn English, and what it means to be a competent user of the language. A further aim is to reach out to English teachers working in contexts where students can be expected to work in globalized workplaces.

Phenomenology is not as common in language studies as other qualitative methodologies, such as ethnography. It however has potential to be a suitable way of exploring individuals' language-related experiences from the first-person perspective. The chapter presents how to do phenomenological research in second language studies, suggest criteria for assessing phenomenological studies, and discuss compatibility with quantitative methods.

The native speaker (NS) norm, which promotes NS competence as the goal of language learning, is not congruent with Global Englishes Language Teaching. The purpose of English phonology courses in many teacher education programs is thus to “fix” teacher candidates’ accents to become nativelike and consequently enable them to teach American and British accents to their own learners. The curriculum has been developed for students in three teacher education programmes at a Swedish university to help them, and subsequently help their learners to achieve internationally intelligible pronunciation and maximised listening comprehension for diverse Global Englishes accents. The portfolio can be assessed qualitatively, in terms of how successfully the student has documented the profile of her pronunciation and critically evaluated her own global speaker and listener intelligibility. Phonology is frequently associated merely with teaching pronunciation although its usefulness for teaching listening comprehension has long been suggested.

Swedish speakers of English have received recognition for their internationally intelligible pronunciation. Reflecting this, English phonetics in teacher education programmes seems to take two extreme positions: either marginalised or acting as a 'pusher' demanding native-like accent from teachers and their pupils. This study aims to explore pre-service teachers' perspectives on the English phonetics lessons that sought 'third' positioning, promoting English as a global lingua franca and bidirectional intelligibility of pronunciation in international contexts. It is argued that phonetics, as a subject, can be a suitable tool for helping teachers to set the goal of English pronunciation in view of the pervasive role of English as a global communication tool. Together with presenting the finding, I discuss its implications for teacher education in 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 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.

This present research was designed to explore how and to what extent explicit knowledge of L2 chunks and chunking, which have both grammatical and idiomatic information, would benefit English learning and use. The operation of an EFL learner's explicit L2 chunks and chunking knowledge has been qualitatively investigated over a 6-month period.Through ethnographic data collecting methods such as observations andinterviews of the participant's process of acquiring L2 knowledge system, it was found that the awareness of explicit knowledge of English chunksand chunking significantly played an effective role in developing the English language system in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity. Based on the results of this study, the researchers suggest that the explicit and declarative knowledge become implicit and procedural knowledge through prolonged and systematic practices: the explicit knowledge of L2 chunks and chunking works positively for L2 learning and use.

English phonetics and phonology often focus on improving learners’ pronunciation. However, phonological processing is ‘a two-way street’ involving both speaker and listener. Thus, pronunciation instruction in this globalized time needs to be complemented with ways to help listeners understand a wide range of accents, thereby challenging the native speakerism and standard language ideology of more traditional English teaching. In this paper, we share our experiences of promoting listener abilities in university courses in Sweden and the US, two very different teaching contexts. In Sweden, Jeong takes a truly phonetic approach, starting from students’ own pronunciations rather than a ‘standard’ model, and focuses on ability to comprehend diverse accents. In the US, Lindemann uses native-speaking students’ complaints about supposedly incomprehensible instructors, not as justification for further training of instructors who are already proficient English users, but as an opportunity to offer listener training to the students. Put together, these experiences provide a basis for Forsberg's reflection on the teaching of L2 phonetics and pronunciation in other languages such as Swedish, and the benefits of shifting some of the focus from speaker to listener in order to begin to overcome native speakerism and standard language ideology.

The article presents how a study that investigated the acquisition of second language academic literacy skills practised the qualitative methodology, interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), from a realist perspective. We share the rationale behind the methodological decisions made in the study, which is followed by a detailed description of the methodological practice. In addition, the evaluation of the study against the realist criteria is reported, and some implications of using IPA based on realism for educational research are discussed. Overall, we suggest that IPA practice from a realist perspective helps go beyond postmodernism paradigms that seems to exert considerable influence on qualitative research in education. Keywords: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), Realist Paradigm, Against Postmodernism, Qualitative Research in Education, English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a well-known concept for English used as an international contact language among people from diverse linguacultural backgrounds. Using a questionnaire, we explored the attitudes of Spanish and Swedish pre-service primary school teachers towards English and its users after their collaboration on a virtual platform, during which they were ELF users. The findings showed that the ELF user attitudes of the two European student cohorts tended to be ambivalent, mixed, and self-contradictory. After discussing factors for participants’ attitudinal tendencies, we conclude that the ambivalence in their overall attitudes seems to mirror the ambivalence of the ‘double’ definitions of English in educational policy documents, which may affect the goals of teaching English in the classroom. We suggest that university teaching help pre-service teachers develop critical perspectives towards English and English users, as well as reflecting on why they teach English to their future pupils.

In teaching and assessing pronunciation of English as an international lingua franca (ELF), intelligibility is more relevant than nativelikeness (Jenkins, 2015). As guidelines for intelligible ELF pronunciation, the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) syllabus (Jenkins, 2002) and relative functional load (FL) of phonemic contrasts (e.g., Catford, 1987) have been used (e.g., Jeong et al., 2018; Rahimi & Ruzrokh, 2016; Sewell, 2017).The paper examines phonemic details in the LFC and relative FL, based on the intelligibility of second language speakers’ phoneme realisation for Swedish university students. Using the perception of a group of Swedish youths for the study can be rationalised that they are known to have very high proficient English skills as a second language (Norrby, 2015). Speech data with IPA transcriptions were from the Speech Accent Archive (http://accent.gmu.edu/index.php), comprising nine speakers’ readings of the same text, whose first languages were Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Somali, Thai, Turkish and Urdu respectively. Each of seventy-five Swedish students taking university courses chose and transcribed one of the nine speakers in English orthography. Through comparing errors in the listeners’ transcriptions, their accounts, and the speakers’ segmental features deviating from either American or British English phoneme inventory, we firstly analysed whether, and to what extent such deviation affected intelligibility. From this analysis, some details of the LFC and relative FL were questioned. For example, while the LFC denotes that all consonants besides interdental fricatives need to be realised as in Standard American/British English, replacing some consonants with others, like plural marking /z/ with /s/ or alveolar /ɹ/ with uvular / ʁ/, did not compromise intelligibility. Likewise, while the ɔ/oʊ contrast is known to have high FL, replacing one with the other did not cause misunderstanding (e.g. realising ‘only’ as [ɔnli]). The findings suggest further scrutinising and developing the LFC and relative FL.

The study examines the intelligibility of a German speaker's replacement of the initial interdental /θ/ with the alveolar fricative [s] in words that occurred in her reading of a short English text. Twenty nine students in university English courses in Sweden listened to, and transcribed the whole reading, where substituting theinitial /θ/ of a word with [s]appeared four times. The result shows that the phoneme substitution by the German speaker did not cause misunderstanding in three instances, but it considerably misled the listeners' understanding of a phrase in one occasion. We discuss this finding in relation to the functional load of the initial θ/scontrast (Catford, 1987), and Jenkins' (2002, 2015) Lingua Franca Core syllabus.

Our previous study examined the mutual intelligibility of Malaysian English to Swedish listeners and Swedish English to Malaysian listeners. The results showed that Swedish listeners did not understand the Malaysian speaker well. In the present study, the Malaysian speaker was trained to alter her realization of the word stress, consonant clusters and long vowels in a way that previous research has found intelligible for both native and non-native English speakers. The audible and measurable alteration significantly increased the intelligibility of the speaker for Swedish listeners. This indicates that the three phonetic features are important for intelligibility in international contexts and suggests including the word stress in the Lingua Franca Phonetic Core. Moreover, we discuss that Malaysian English being a dialect and Swedish English being a similect may be relevant to their mutual intelligibility and relate the discussion to teaching English pronunciation in countries where English has been localized.

In using English as an international language (EIL), one important issue is mutual intelligibility among EIL speakers from different language backgrounds. The present study investigates the cross-linguistic intelligibility of Malay-accented English and Swedish-accented English, regarding the three phonetic features – word stress pattern, consonant clusters, and long vowel in particular. We prepared 15 English statements that are evidently true or false if understood, and examined to what extent the three phonetic features are related to 30 Swedish and 38 Malaysian listeners’ understandings of the statements read by a speaker from the other language group. We compared the Malaysian and Swedish listeners’ answers given with understanding as well as processing time to respond. The listeners’ own accounts of their struggles in understanding the speakers’ pronunciations were also analyzed. Results show that Malaysian listeners easily understood Swedish-accented English, while Swedish listeners struggled to understand Malay-accented English. The difference between the two groups of listeners seems to be closely related to the degree of the realization of the three phonetic features by the speakers as well as to the degree of the use of these features as perceptual cues by the listeners. Based on the findings, we discuss potential phonetic core features of EIL for intelligibility and some pedagogical implications for teaching English pronunciation to the learners of the language.

The study examaines changes in a native Malaysian’s pronunciation of word stress, vowel length and consonant clusters before and after she was tranined. Jeong & Thorén (under review) showed that this training made the speaker’s pronunciation more intelligible to native Swedish listeners. We look at the changes on an acoustic level by measuring vowel duration, word duration, f0 patterns and realization of consonant clusters. The result shows that, after training, her pronunciation improved in all the three aspects. The improvement was audible as well as measurable with acoustical changes in absolute and relative vowel duration and realization of consonant clusters. Word stress patterns were also improved but with less clear-cut acoustic correlates.

Since 1996 Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) has grown rapidly and been applied in areas outside its initial “home” of health psychology. However, explorations of its application from a researcher's perspective are scarce. This paper provides reflections on the experiences of eight individual researchers using IPA in diverse disciplinary fields and cultures. The research studies were conducted in the USA, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK by researchers with backgrounds in business management, consumer behaviour, mental health nursing, nurse education, applied linguistics, clinical psychology, health and education. They variously explored media awareness, employee commitment, disengagement from mental health services, in-vitro fertilisation treatment, student nurses' experience of child protection, second language acquisition in a university context, the male experience of spinal cord injury and academics experience of working in higher education and women’s experiences of body size and health practices. By bringing together intercultural, interdisciplinary experiences of using IPA, the paper discusses perceived strengths and weaknesses of IPA.