Foreign or Native-like? The Attitudes of Czech EFL Learners Towards Accents of English and Their Use as Pronunciation Models

Abstract

Attitudes of language users to English in the international context certainly do not rank among newly studied subjects. One of the frequent caveats of the ongoing research, however, is that it mostly targets university students of English, which may provide a very skewed perspective. This study focuses on young Czech speakers of English who have studied or are studying other disciplines and uses an online survey to examine their attitudes to English pronunciation in general and to their own pronunciation, to various accents of English and also to exposure to model accents. Analyses of 145 respondents show that 70% of them would like to acquire a native-like accent (most frequently General British), even though most of them use English with other foreigners (and not native speakers). They prefer to be exposed to many different accents of English, native and non-native, and believe that learners should themselves choose which accent they want to regard as a model. One of the most important findings concerns the participants’ belief that pronunciation is teachable and that it is worth working on it; this should provide encouragement to teachers of English. In general, our results suggest that the ELF approach and the associated Lingua Franca Core concept do not seem to be relevant for young Czech users of English.