Swedish Youths as Listeners of Global Englishes Speakers With Diverse Accents: Listener Intelligibility, Listener Comprehensibility, Accentedness Perception, and Accentedness Acceptance

As reflected in the concept of Global Englishes , English mediates global communication, where speakers represent not merely those from English-speaking countries like United Kingdom or States but also people a wide range linguistic backgrounds, who speak language with diverse accents. Thus, to communicate internationally, cultivating maximized listening proficiency for and positive attitudes toward accents is ever more important. However, their preference American its popular culture, it uncertain whether Swedish youth learners are developing these key qualities be prepared globalized use English. To address this, we randomly assigned 160 upper secondary students (mean age = 17.25) into six groups, each group listened one speakers. The first languages were Mandarin, Russian/Ukrainian, Tamil, Lusoga/Luganda, English, British Through comparing student examined listener intelligibility (actual understanding), comprehensibility (feeling ease difficulty), accentedness perception (perceiving an accent as native foreign), acceptance (showing negative attitude accent) results showed that scores perception/attitude ratings participants favored two privileged accents–the across all no correlation was detected between actual understanding ratings, which often had strong feelings ease/difficulty regarding Taken together, our suggest current education needs innovation aligned national syllabus promotes perspective. That is, need guided improve sense familiarity besides they prefer. Moreover, innovative pedagogical work should undertaken change youths’ perceptions prepare them become open-minded