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English Phonology in a Globalized World: Challenging Native Speakerism through Listener Training in Universities in Sweden and the US

Hyeseung Jeong, Stephanie Lindemann and Julia Forsberg
p. 135-153

Abstracts

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.

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1Education in both first- (L1) and second-language (L2) English phonetics and phonology has focused on ‘standard’ American and British pronunciations known as ‘General American (GA)’ and ‘Received Pronunciation (RP)’, and more recently ‘General British (GB)’ (e.g., Collins., Mees, & Carley, 2019; Roach, 2009). In particular, L2 English phonetics and phonology present these ‘standard’ English sound systems as the target models for teaching pronunciation to learners. Although widely accepted and adopted in university teaching, the traditional focus of English phonetics and phonology on ‘standard’ American/British English and its application to teaching English as a second language exhibits native speakerism and standard language ideology, which we strive to challenge in our teaching practices in Sweden and the US.

2Native speakerism involves the idealization of those who are identified as ‘native speakers’ as models and teachers of the language (Holliday, 2018). Given that ‘native speaker’ is often explicitly associated with whiteness (Von Esch, Motha, & Kubota, 2020), e.g., in the US (Shuck, 2006) and South Korea (Ahn, Choi, & Kiaer, 2020), a ‘native speaker’ model for pronunciation may essentially be a ‘white’ speaker model, a racist standard that has nothing to do with language itself. Relatedly, standard language ideology (Lippi-Green, 2012: 67) can be described as a “bias toward an abstracted, idealized, and homogenous spoken language”. In fact, what passes for ‘standard’ is in actuality not homogenous, with considerable variation in what passes for ‘GA’, for example (see Lindemann, 2017, for examples). L2 speakers are often ‘corrected’ for exhibiting this same variation, such that they are ultimately held to a stricter standard than are ‘native speakers’. Even where the actual pronunciation does differ, such differences do not necessarily lead to difficulties in communication, yet standard language ideology may use such variation as justification for language-trait-focused discrimination (Lippi-Green, 2012).

3With English as a lingua franca (ELF) phonology, Jenkins (2000) played a foundational role in endeavoring to move away from standard language ideology and native speakerism in L2 phonology and pronunciation teaching. She clearly pointed out the irrelevance of native or native-like pronunciation to having intelligibility in ELF communication, based on observations of interaction among L2 speakers. Jenkins, some other ELF researchers (e.g., Deterding, 2013), and several practitioners who have adopted her ELF phonology (e.g., Walker, 2010) suggested that realizing certain ‘standard’ English phonological features, such as vowel length contrast, can be beneficial for ELF communication. They referred to these features as the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), to be a guiding syllabus for teaching pronunciation. Jenkins (2000) however also warned against decontextualized application of the LFC, emphasizing the importance of accommodation strategies, where mutual intelligibility is achieved through negotiating the pronunciation of a given word, rather than appeal to a ‘standard’ pronunciation.

4Meanwhile, in the context of teaching pronunciation to immigrants in Anglophone countries, researchers like Levis (2005) and Munro and Derwing (1995; 2015) likewise sought to eschew native speakerism, viewing it as an unnecessary demand on L2 speakers. Instead, based on their extensive research, they have suggested ways to help L2 speakers to have ‘comfortably understandable’ pronunciation while maintaining their ‘non-native’ accent features. Moreover, in countries where English has been localized, such as India, Nigeria, Jamaica, Singapore, and Malaysia (Jenkins, 2015), researchers have suggested that the new varieties can establish their own phonological systems that safeguard both international intelligibility and linguistic identity, not necessarily conforming to the phonetics and phonology of ‘standard’ British or American English (e.g., Pillai, 2017).

5One approach to resisting standard language ideology and native speakerism, although not exactly within the fields of phonetics and phonology, investigates the possibility of training native English listeners to better understand diverse international speakers (e.g., Kubota, 2001; Lindemann et al., 2016). The idea of training native speakers to be better listeners of diverse accents is not only powerful for dismantling standard language ideology and native speakerism, but has also led to the revelation that, for using English for global communication, non-native speakers—as well as native speakers—need to train their listening skills for diverse English pronunciations (Jeong et al., 2021). Traditionally, ‘non-standard’ accents were supposed to be ‘corrected’, or to become ‘standard’, and L2 listeners were instructed exclusively on comprehending ‘standard’ English speakers, rather than helped to understand other accent varieties (Sung, 2016; Tsang, 2019). Although nascent, studies on training L2 listeners to understand a variety of English accents have begun to join the body of research on perceptual training for accent variation (e.g., Hamada & Suzuki, 2021).

6Our experiences of promoting listener abilities in universities in Sweden and the US, shared in the following sections, are in line with the research on listener training for processing diverse accents. Although the teaching contexts in the two countries are very different, we equally witness the huge impact of globalization on our students’ lives and their growing need to be competent listeners of speakers with diverse accents, including non-Anglophone accents, both within their own country and abroad. Central to Jeong’s practice in Sweden is the concept of listener intelligibility, the ability to understand a speaker’s pronunciation (Jeong et al., 2021). With the concept, her teaching emphasizes that phonetic and phonological processing involves both speaker and listener, and thus responsibility for intelligibility in international contexts is not only on the speaker with speaker intelligibility—ability to make one’s pronunciation understandable for a listener—but equally on the listener with listener intelligibility. Lindemann’s phonetics and phonology courses in the US are theoretical courses, not focused on English, and thus do not purport to teach pronunciation or listening skills at all. However, she has offered listener intelligibility training in response to requests to help improve speaker intelligibility, with the argument that when the speaker is already highly intelligible, it makes sense to instead train their listeners who complain of difficulty understanding. Following Jeong’s and Lindemann’s discussion of their contexts, Forsberg discusses their practices from a Swedish perspective, while reflecting on her own phonetics teaching in teacher education and her research on standard language ideology.

Sweden: Listener-Focused Global Englishes Phonetics

How It Started

7Traditionally in Sweden, phonetics (fonetik) often refers to an overarching subject including both phonetics and phonology (Thorén, 2014). When assigned to teach phonetics courses to English majors and pre-service teachers, Jeong soon discovered the incompatibility between herself as a phonetics lecturer and the extant curriculum for the courses. The curriculum largely stood on the nativeness principle that “holds it is both possible and desirable [for L2 speakers] to achieve native-like pronunciation” (Levis, 2005: 370), using the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) (e.g., see Cunningham, 2015; Sylvén, 2013), which predicts non-native speakers’ pronunciation features in view of their L1 phonological systems and regards such features, when present, as ‘errors’ that should be removed or corrected (see Munro, 2018 for a critical discussion of the CAH in pronunciation teaching). By contrast, Jeong explicitly rejects native-speaker-centric views (Jeong et al., 2017, 2020), instead relying on the intelligibility principle that “holds that [speakers] simply need to be understandable” without having to emulate ‘standard’ native speaker accents (Levis, 2005: 370).

8Thus, developing a new curriculum was inevitable for Jeong. Initially, she adopted ELF phonology with a focus on speaker intelligibility (Deterding, 2013; Walker, 2010). This worked better than the previous CAH-based curriculum. The intelligibility principle was new to most students, who nonetheless welcomed it as making more sense than native speakerism with the reality of globalized English. However, a phonetics course that mainly aimed to improve learners’ speaker intelligibility did not greatly benefit Swedish students, who are already highly intelligible in international contexts (Jeong, 2019; Jeong et al., 2017, 2020). The fundamental question was, besides helping improve pronunciation, what L2 phonetics could offer to English users and learners in Sweden. Inspired by research on L1 listener training (Kubota, 2001; Lindemann et al., 2016; Subtirelu & Lindemann, 2016), and seeing the needs for maximized listening comprehension of Global Englishes (Melchers, Shaw, Sundqvist, 2019), the emphasis of Jeong’s teaching has shifted to fostering listener intelligibility for diverse English accents (Jeong, 2019).

How Teaching and Learning Has Proceeded

9As noted by Lindemann in her US context (discussed below), helping students become good listeners of diverse English accents requires not only training listening skills and strategies but also critically addressing attitudes towards different accents (Lindemann, 2002; Subtirelu & Lindemann, 2016). Through their education (Forsberg et al., 2019) and exposure to the popular culture of English-speaking countries, especially American pop culture, young Swedes tend to have positive attitudes towards privileged native accents and somewhat negative ones towards other English accents (Eriksson, 2019; Jeong et al., 2021), which Jeong thought should be addressed in her phonetics courses. When time allows, she organizes asynchronous written discussions on online learning platforms for critically reflecting on attitudes towards different English accents. Students first read articles about accent attitudes like Lindemann (2017), then write a summary and reflection of the reading materials in group forums and reply to each other’s posts, drawing on their own experiences of learning and using English.

10The main objective of Jeong’s phonetics teaching is to help students gain knowledge of basic phonetic/phonological concepts and utilize these concepts as tools to analyze their own speaker and listener intelligibility (Jeong, 2021). The starting point of her teaching is not any ideal model but real speech sounds, including students’ own and other diverse speakers’ pronunciations. Later on, more speakers are introduced as a showcase of diverse pronunciation and as ones that deploy effective pronunciation strategies. This approach was initially inspired by Lindemann, who shared that in her phonetics course she begins from her own vowels. This idea—beginning with sounds—was revolutionary, as most phonetics/phonology textbooks introduce phonetic concepts through ‘RP’, ‘GA’ or other similar abstract sound systems despite the definition of phonetics as the study of sounds. Another noteworthy pedagogical decision was to not involve the concepts of phoneme and phone in teaching consonants and vowels. Besides the fact that it is hard for most students to understand that phonemes are not actual sounds but abstract ones, once symbols are used to represent phonemes, the sound values the symbols represent are perceived as ‘ideal’ sounds to be emulated, hence to some extent reinforcing the already entrenched standard language ideology. In fact, the concept of phonemes, shared conceptions/abstractions of a sound segment within a single speech community, may not fit Global Englishes phonetics, which deals with diverse segmental variation in different speech communities (O’Neal, 2020). As an alternative to involving the phoneme and phone distinction, Jeong has adapted the idea behind Wells’ (1982) lexical set, using English orthography to help students explore Global Englishes phonetic/phonological varieties in a non-discriminatory way.

11Thus, to teach speech sounds, Jeong draws on the global variation described in Schneider (2004). For example, as seen in Figure 1, for the initial consonant of the word group with members such as ‘tap’, three voiceless plosives are presented as equally accepted pronunciations that appear frequently in different varieties. Likewise, for the vowel of the word group that includes members like ‘face’, three different diphthongs and one monophthong are all introduced as possible, equal pronunciations. Through several activities, students listen to different alternatives written in the IPA and select the ones close to their own pronunciations. While doing so, they gradually become familiar with possible global vowel and consonant variation and sound-symbol correspondences. After having practiced enough to read and write their own consonants and vowels in the IPA, students create their own consonant tables for place, manner and voicing, and vowel charts for tongue positions and lip shapes.

Figure 1: Examples of presenting alternative segmental variation

Figure 1: Examples of presenting alternative segmental variation

For teaching supra-segmental features and prosody, some common notions like ‘English is stress-timed’ or ‘there are phonological patterns for word stress that are universally followed by all English speakers’ are not taken for granted. Instead, for example, it is discussed that, depending on varieties, an English pronunciation can be either stress-timed or syllable-timed. To showcase a variety of supra-segmental features among speakers with diverse accents, several speakers reading the same words or sentences are presented with visualization of the speakers’ pronunciations using Praat (fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/), as seen in Figure 2. After having learned essential prosodic/supra-segmental concepts through listening to and ‘watching’ a variety of speakers’ pronunciations, students are guided to record, visualize, and do some basic analysis of their own supra-segmental features, such as vowel length, word stress, sentence stress, and intonation.

Figure 2: Praat spectrograms of five speakers’ pronunciations of ‘excellent’

Figure 2: Praat spectrograms of five speakers’ pronunciations of ‘excellent’

12For an examination task, students make an oral presentation about their own speaker and listener intelligibility, focusing on the latter. They first briefly discuss whether their own pronunciation would be intelligible in view of the Lingua Franca Core (Jenkins, 2000, 2015). They then more extensively discuss their own listener intelligibility of a speaker they choose, who they admire and want to understand well. The discussion begins from sharing the experience of training perception through listening repeatedly and thoroughly to a short sound clip of the speaker until they can dictate every word correctly. This is followed by analyzing their comprehension of the chosen speaker, focusing on listening strategies developed during self-training, in what ways the training helped understand the speaker better, and how it has impacted them as listeners of diverse Global Englishes speakers.

13Some challenges have been faced by students and Jeong. For students, it is evidently hard to avoid being judgmental about ‘non-standard’ accents. Even when the intention is not criticizing a speaker, finding positive or at least neutral language to describe ‘non-standard’ accent features seems challenging. For Jeong, occasional students have expressed strong resistance to her Global Englishes approach, including expressing their wishes to learn ‘more standard’ pronunciation with a teacher with a ‘native’ or ‘near-native’ accent. Overall, though, responses to listener-focused Global Englishes phonetics have been positive. For example, three students, who selected the Indian Java instructor Som Prakash Rai, the Spanish football player Adama Traoré, and the Jamaican rapper/songwriter Mikayla Simpson for their own listening training, described how they have improved their comprehension of the speakers:

  • 1  Extracts from three students’ presentations (informed consent obtained for all examples).

– My own listener intelligibility has benefited from this [listening to Som Prakash Rai] and I think that most troubles I have stem from being unaccustomed to the rhythm, stress and intonation of Indian English. The more I will listen to it, the more my listener intelligibility will increase.
– I have gotten a deeper understanding of why some accents have different features on English than others.
­– I am understanding her [Mikayla Simpson] better and I can listen to her other interviews without facing the same challenges as before! I do believe this has helped me to understand others with similar Englishes better.1

As Rindal and Iannuzzi (2020: 133) put it, “Reflection about pronunciation is probably more relevant for many learners than for instance lectures in RP and GA phonetics.” Although self-perception of improved listener intelligibility may not always reflect real improvement, it can still signal increased confidence and willingness to listen more to speakers with diverse accents. Listener-focused phonetics overall seemed to help develop (more) positive attitudes towards Global Englishes accents, particularly towards ‘non-standard’ ones. The student who trained by listening to the football player Traoré concludes, “I have become curious about how different accents sound in everyday life [and] … gained interest in analyzing English accents of other romance languages and comparing them to each other”. Another student, after analyzing his listener intelligibility of the Scottish singer/songwriter Kris Drever, shares that he got “deeply interested in” Swedish-accented and other L1-accented English pronunciations and gained “deeper understanding and respect of different Englishes”. Speaking Swedish as their L1 or most dominant L2, and largely influenced by American English, students share similar phonetic inventories; the varieties introduced in the teaching material are certainly limited. Nevertheless, learning phonetics based on their own and a range of speakers’ pronunciations from different varieties seems to help students critically reflect on standard language ideology and get ready for real life communication with diverse Global Englishes speakers.

US: Training ‘Native’ Speakers

Training Applied Linguistics Students

14An applied linguistics department in the US has traditionally been a less obvious place for listener training or even speaker training, as students are already expected to be highly proficient in spoken English, in most cases speaking it from an early age and in many cases being monolingual in English. Courses in phonetics or phonology are therefore likely to focus on the IPA or other transcription systems and describing and transcribing sounds of non-stigmatized American English (so-called ‘GA’). Teacher preparation courses may also focus on how to teach such pronunciation, but any learning that benefits students’ own production and comprehension is likely to be incidental.

15The larger context supports this approach. In addition to standard language ideology, discussed in the introduction, ideologies about native speakers as having “complete and possibly innate competence in the language” (Pennycook, 2017: 175)—related to native speakerism—and about monolingualism as the norm (Wiley & Lukes, 1996) would suggest that the mostly native-speaker audience in the US would have no need for training to understand Global Englishes. Specifically, native speaker ideology includes the assumption that native speakers know their language perfectly, suggesting that further training would be irrelevant. Monolingualist ideology further suggests that any languages other than English are irrelevant in the US, and that anyone who speaks some other language must thus speak English as if it is their only language, presumably indistinguishably from other US native English speakers. In this context, applied linguists are not asked or expected to provide training to people who have been speaking English their entire life, because they are already considered to have the necessary skills.

16For Lindemann, starting from her own sounds in her phonetics classes was not particularly revolutionary, given that her accent is generally unstigmatized in the US and thus passes as ‘GA’. Students usually transcribe her or recordings of non-stigmatized US English, so although the course is presented within a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach, there is a de facto emphasis on ‘GA’, and in the undergraduate class, no practice with speakers of Global Englishes is provided. For some assignments, students do transcribe themselves, and anything that is not a clear transcription error (e.g., using [y] for [j] or spelling-influenced errors such as adding a vowel between the [k] and [t] of walked) is counted as correct. Lindemann usually gives feedback on hyper-articulated (potentially spelling-influenced) transcriptions, which can sometimes spur discussion about whether the student really pronounces that sound or not. Even on assignments where they are transcribing her speech, she gives feedback but does not deduct points for instances in which their transcription suggests that they are filtering her pronunciation through their own, as, after all, the goal is for them to learn sound-symbol correspondences, not to pronounce things like she does. Having learned about how Jeong has more completely based the class on the students’ own pronunciations, she is interested in trying something similar in hers, so that her teaching does not privilege students as much for having a variety like her own.

Training Students beyond Applied Linguistics

17In fact, while the courses Lindemann teaches can sometimes raise awareness of variation in non-stigmatized native varieties and challenge students to accept a wider range of variation, students in her applied linguistics program usually are familiar with a range of accents, or become so in the process of completing their degree, as instructors and classmates come from varied language backgrounds and they need to know or study at least one language beyond English. Those students most in need of training to understand a wide range of accents are unlikely to take applied linguistics courses. However, Lippi-Green’s (1994, 2012) research on accent discrimination led to Lindemann’s interest in investigating the ways that native English speakers contribute to poor communication with non-native English speakers (Lindemann, 2002), and ultimately to the possibility of working to address those native-speaker issues to improve communication (Subtirelu & Lindemann, 2016).

18An early attempt at training native speakers for better comprehension of Korean accents (Lindemann et al., 2016) compared explicit instruction, providing information on how Korean and English differ and how and why that affects Korean accents in English, with implicit instruction, following previous research that showed that practice listening to and writing down individual sentences spoken by different speakers of a non-native variety could improve comprehension of sentences spoken by a new speaker of that variety (Bradlow & Bent, 2008; Sidaras, Alexander, & Nygaard, 2009). Both implicit and explicit approaches improved comprehension of individual sentences spoken by a new speaker. However, a drawback with the training was that its status as a laboratory research study using volunteers recruited from the university psychology subject pool meant that it was not accessible for wider use.

19Interestingly, the first opportunity to offer such a training more broadly came not through a request or even perceived need for such training, but rather from a request for training for non-native-English-speaking instructors. A former colleague, now at a different institution, had been asked by the computer science department at that institution to provide support for international graduate student instructors (commonly called International Teaching Assistants, or ITAs, in the US) in response to student complaints about the instructors’ intelligibility. Since her university already had excellent training for ITAs, which these instructors had already passed, she suspected that the issue was not with the instructors, but with their students, who were new to the university, largely from relatively homogenous English-speaking backgrounds, and relatively inexperienced with linguistic diversity. Crucially, she presented evidence of the importance of the listener’s role in successful communication (e.g., Lindemann, 2002) to suggest training for the students rather than their instructors, and the department agreed. She then invited Lindemann and others to develop training with her.

20That training (described in detail in Subtirelu, Lindemann, Acheson, & Campbell, 2022) included one hour online and one hour in class as part of a seminar taken by nearly all first-year students in the department. It attempted to address listener attitudes and strategies for successful communication with instructors from varied linguistic backgrounds, in addition to the ability to understand a range of accents. The online portion included brief video lectures explaining why and how different languages influence accents in English and was thus somewhat similar to the ‘explicit’ training in Lindemann et al. (2016) discussed above, but without the specific focus on Korean accents. There was also an ‘implicit’ training portion, in which recordings of individual sentences read by four different speakers were presented, with the opportunity for the student participant to type what they heard, get feedback on what the speaker actually said, then hear the sentence again. This training was again based on that in Lindemann et al. (2016), but with Chinese speakers rather than Korean speakers and fewer sentences. An additional portion presented two one-minute lectures by Indian English speakers, followed by comprehension questions. The choice of Chinese and Indian English speakers in this case was based on the department’s population of international instructors, which was dominated by instructors from China and India.

21A similar situation occurred at Lindemann’s own university, this time with an instructor who taught a very large class with multiple breakout sections taught by different teaching assistants, many of whom were ITAs. When students complained to the instructor about the ITAs, the instructor requested help from the university’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to provide further training to the ITAs. The contact at the Center was another colleague familiar with Lindemann’s work and suggested that the problem was not with the instructor’s ITAs, but with her students. The instructor agreed that the ITAs were in fact highly proficient in English and accepted the offer to connect her to Lindemann to develop training for her students. Because her course was both upper-level and not related to international concerns, the instructor was concerned that students would not see the relevance of listener intelligibility training. Additionally, the ITAs were from a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds, so there was no reason to focus on one particular language. In consultation with her, Lindemann therefore shortened the previous version of the training to total approximately one hour, online only, with a wider variety of speakers. The same videos with explicit training were used as in the previous training, while the implicit training featured individual sentences by speakers from China, India, Croatia, and Korea, and mini-lectures by a different speaker from India and one from Senegal.

22The training and data regarding training that specifically addressed comprehension of Global Englishes from Subtirelu, Lindemann, Acheson, and Campbell (2022) was based on just twenty sentences, too little to show an improvement in actual comprehension. It is possible that reaction time might increase even with so little practice (Clarke & Garrett, 2004), but given that the students were typing the sentences that they heard, measuring reaction time was not a viable option. While Lindemann had initially hoped to include more practice sentences for the training at her own university, the version ultimately offered to students again had only twenty sentences due to the course instructor’s concern that it would be difficult to get students to do even an hour, especially as the platform required them to do the training in one sitting. Interestingly, in response to a question at the end of training asking for optional comments, several students mentioned the sentence practice as a fun part of the training, as they liked its interactive nature. In any case, a challenge of offering training for undergraduates in response to their own complaints is this pressure to keep the training extremely short.

23These trainings at both universities were still limited to a single department or even a single class, with just one contact who agreed to the training. In order to make the training more widely available, online-only versions were developed, somewhat independently at both universities, that could be integrated into their online learning platforms. Both were funded and will be offered through the centers originally contacted by instructors for help for ITAs and can be used in a variety of courses, particularly for first-year students and/or classes with international themes, with no additional work needed by the course instructors. These trainings are also expandable, with additional modules providing more in-depth practice with different accents as one option.

24Even given that the current versions of the training are most likely insufficient to actually train students to understand a wide variety of accents, they introduce a different way of thinking about communication with speakers from different linguistic backgrounds. They can also build the undergraduates’ confidence that they can adapt to a variety of speakers. Perhaps most importantly, requiring such training for all undergraduates (or at least all undergraduates in a particular class, or major, or general area) starts to change the culture from one that is focused only on non-native-speakers’ speaking proficiency to one that recognizes the shared nature of responsibility for the success of communication across linguistic difference.

What Can we Learn? A Reflection from a Swedish Perspective

25The accounts of listener-focused training above depict two widely different contexts, suggesting that listener-focused approaches may be applicable to an array of teaching and training situations. In view of globalized English, there is a need to enable students (including pre-service teachers) to develop tools to question standard language ideology and native speaker norms (see further in Jansen, Mohr, & Forsberg, 2021). Derwing and Munro (2015: 172), concluding their book about L2 pronunciation teaching, suggest implementing “listening training for pre-service programming for teachers, social workers and others whose future careers will bring them into regular contact with L2 users.” Their message addressed to L1-speaking teachers is aligned with both Jeong’s L2-speaking students and Lindemann’s L1-speaking students.

26The listener trainings in Sweden and the US see language abilities in a specific context and in relation to the interlocutor’s needs, contrasting to the approaches that ask the learner to achieve decontextualized, ideal native speaker competences (e.g., Wells, 2009). While acknowledging the intelligibility principle of Jenkins’s Lingua Franca Core in international contexts, Wells (2009) poses the question of who the learner aims to be able to speak to and suggests that setting ‘high’ goals for pupils is beneficial. The question is followed by his own answer that, in aiming ‘high’, the highest of ideals entails sounding like a native speaker. In contrast to such a native-speaker-centric view, Jeong’s and Lindemann’s practices resonate more with changing perspectives among learners worldwide. For example, Rindal and Iannuzzi (2020) found that Norwegian adolescents do not believe they need to sound like native speakers in order to be proficient in English, as spoken L2 “is related to identity, and teachers can take this into consideration when teaching pronunciation” (129). The researchers thus argue that “it could be problematic to ask students to imitate a native-speaker accent, and teachers can instead encourage them to find an accent that allows them to be themselves in English” (129). Kong and Kang (2020) report similar views among South Korean adolescents in Malaysia. The Korean youths in the study invested in learning and using English, but their sociocultural identities “were connected to their own accents.” Specifically, they preferred accents that they were extensively exposed to and thus felt familiar with, with nativism irrelevant for their accent preferences; some of them even “found it hard to understand their [native speaker teachers’] accents” (12).

27Norton (2013: 55) argues:

[W]hile it is important for language learners to understand what Hymes (1979) calls ‘the rules of use’ of the target language, it is equally important for them to explore whose interests these rules serve. What is considered appropriate usage is not self-evident (Bourne, 1988), but must be understood with reference to inequitable relations of power between interlocutors.

Thus, we have to consider not only the listener perspective and the responsibility of the listener in the communicative situation, but also the difference in power between those who define ‘standard’ and those who are supposed to conform to it, e.g., between language teachers and learners in Sweden, between L1 students and L2 ITAs in the US, and between a reference group of L1 speakers (cf. “referees”, Bell, 1984: 161, 2001; Forsberg et al., 2021: 146 & 150) and L2 pre-service teachers. The listener training practices in Sweden and the US address such power differences by requiring native or more native-like interlocutors to learn to adjust to different accents instead of the usual requirement for a one-way adjustment by L2 speakers to approximate L1 speakers. The listener-focused approach(es) suggested by Jeong and Lindemann as well as other strategies for overcoming standard language ideology (Jansen et al., 2021) would benefit the education of teachers of English.

28Jeong’s practice in Sweden has a truly phonetic, descriptive focus on individual students/pre-service teachers, and on the intelligibility principle. Her approach is in line with the communicative focus of the syllabi for English education in Sweden (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018a, 2018b; Forsberg et al., 2019). Shifting the teaching goals from native speaker competence to communicative skills, the Swedish National Agency for Education “explicitly engages with (re)territorialisation, or locating English in settings beyond the British and American centres that have historically dominated English teaching” (Hult, 2017: 269). Given that all references to native-speaker English in these syllabi were removed in 1994 (Modiano, 2009; Hult, 2017), it is clear that native speaker norms have little or no place in the training of pre-service English teachers in Sweden, and Jeong’s approach is a reasonable interpretation of the syllabi that works towards minimizing the students’ standard language ideology (cf. Jansen et al., 2021).

29Something that might have jumped out at the reader: Jeong avoiding the phoneme/phone distinction in order to minimize native speaker norms, and because it is not strictly necessary for the student groups she teaches. Tradition aside, this approach reduces the risk of intensifying students’ native speakerism and standard language ideology. Results from Forsberg et al. (2019) and Mohr, Jansen, and Forsberg (2021) indicate that English teachers in Sweden (as well as in Germany) mainly aspire to use and teach British English, American English, or something they consider a ‘neutral’ variety, while rejecting many other ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ varieties as viable options in the classroom. The preference to teach these standard varieties is partially based on their desire to conform to native speaker norms, but is also a shortcut to teaching and assessing their students by using the English varieties that are most readily accessible to them. Having a set of templates of acceptable varieties may make teaching pronunciation seem less daunting. This is one reason why the phoneme—and indeed, phonetics teaching that is model-based—can be convenient. However, it is also one way in which the phoneme can be used to reinforce native speakerism. In order to benefit from the phoneme/phone distinction and the surrounding theory without perpetuating native speakerism and standard language ideology, teachers should strive to convey the phoneme as a type and the phone as a token, rather than the phoneme as a model and the phone as a variant of it.

30Meanwhile, in Lindemann’s L1 listener training in the US, the shifting of communicative responsibility from L2 instructors to L1 student listeners challenges native speakerism and standard language ideology. It highlights that the problem with communication difficulties may be insufficient comprehension skills and strategies among students who otherwise perceive themselves as unproblematic ‘standard native speakers’ and thus easily blame the international instructors despite their high proficiency. This questioning of native-speaker-centric ideologies through the responsibility shift from international speaker to L1 listener can be highly relevant to European countries like Sweden, where international communication in the host country’s language(s) is increasingly common due to immigration and the Bologna Process. Thus, for example Forsberg seeks to encourage pre- and in-service teachers in her L2 Swedish phonetics class to reflect on two recurring questions: what is the goal of teaching pronunciation to L2 speakers? and whose responsibility is intelligibility and comprehension in communication between L1 and L2 speakers? Standard language ideology and native speakerism are not specified as topics in the course aims or requirements, but they nevertheless underline the perspectives put forward by students, in course literature and throughout society. In order to address these questions head-on, it is important to address these ideologies, and ways to do so are suggested in Lindemann’s account.

31Fundamentally, the listener training approaches in Sweden and the US specifically frame students as listeners, to help them prepare for international communication with Global Englishes speakers, an emerging practice in language teaching (e.g., Hamada & Suzuki, 2021). This centrally involves challenging native speakerism and standard language ideology: Jeong by overhauling an existing module and approaching phonetics through students’ own pronunciation rather than through models “to boldly go beyond ‘going native’” (Pillai, 2017: 7), and Lindemann by providing listener training when she was initially asked for speaker training. They have both found ways to problematize the ideologies present in their own contexts, demonstrating that doing so is possible even when course aims and requirements do not specify that students learn to question these ideologies. Native speakerism and standard language ideology are problematic not only in the teaching and research of L2 English phonology, phonetics, and pronunciation, but also in the teaching of other linguistic subjects and other languages, where the same mechanisms and types of norms are in place and are further exacerbated by negative attitudes to and lack of familiarity with L2 speech (Subtirelu & Lindemann, 2016). We therefore suggest that it is crucial that anyone involved in language education and research, including phonetics and phonology, be aware of the implications of teaching a specific variety in order to encourage their own students to question rather than perpetuate standard language ideology and native speakerism.

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Notes

1  Extracts from three students’ presentations (informed consent obtained for all examples).

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1: Examples of presenting alternative segmental variation
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ranam/docannexe/image/951/img-1.png
File image/png, 45k
Title Figure 2: Praat spectrograms of five speakers’ pronunciations of ‘excellent’
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ranam/docannexe/image/951/img-2.png
File image/png, 583k
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References

Bibliographical reference

Hyeseung Jeong, Stephanie Lindemann and Julia Forsberg, “English Phonology in a Globalized World: Challenging Native Speakerism through Listener Training in Universities in Sweden and the US”Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines, 55 | 2022, 135-153.

Electronic reference

Hyeseung Jeong, Stephanie Lindemann and Julia Forsberg, “English Phonology in a Globalized World: Challenging Native Speakerism through Listener Training in Universities in Sweden and the US”Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines [Online], 55 | 2022, Online since 01 February 2024, connection on 23 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ranam/951; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ranam.951

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About the authors

Hyeseung Jeong

Department of Education Sciences and Languages, University West

Stephanie Lindemann

Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL, Georgia State University

Julia Forsberg

Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University

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