Production and identification of American and British English among Chinese L2 English learners — The Association Specialists
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  2. SESSION 3: Language, media, and technology
  3. Production and identification of American and British English among Chinese L2 English learners

Production and identification of American and British English among Chinese L2 English learners (20387)

Yanyu Yang 1
  1. National University of Singapore, Singapore, SINGAPORE

Despite calls to shift away from native-speaker norms in English Language Teaching (ELT), American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) continue to dominate as norms in most ELT settings, including in China. Because China has not strongly oriented towards one of these norms, students are exposed to varieties of both AmE and BrE; moreover, variety exposure varies by region, as China does not have nationally unified English learning materials. Drawing on data from perception and production tasks, the present study explores whether Chinese students gain sufficient sociolinguistic knowledge to distinguish AmE and BrE, and what social factors constrain adoption of their associated features.

32 Chinese university students completed an accent identification task and speech production task for this analysis. In the identification task, participants were asked to distinguish between AmE and BrE audio stimuli. Respondents showed relatively high accuracy in the task overall, with English majors demonstrating significantly better performance.

The production task focused on three phonological features that distinguish AmE and BrE: postvocalic rhoticity, LOT rounding, and the BATH-TRAP distinction. Rather than adopting features associated with one of these regional norms, most participants exhibited a hybrid pattern. Notably, performance in the accent identification task showed no correlation with production patterns. Regional origin and major, however, did exhibit significant effects in a mixed-effects model; students from Northern China were more likely than their Southern peers to adopt AmE features, and English majors were more likely than non-English majors to use postvocalic rhoticity.

These findings suggest that, despite exposure to both AmE and BrE that has resulted in hybrid production patterns, Chinese students are generally not developing sociolinguistic knowledge regarding the features of these varieties. Acquisition of variants, then, may be shaped by exposure to certain learning materials and the development of norms amongst teachers and peers.