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Exploring English Teachers' attitudes towards Pronunciation issues and varieties of English in three circles of world Englishes

Paper · 2017 · Mohammad Khatib and Abbas Monfared

Summary

Khatib and Monfared examine how English teachers in Kachru's three circles view pronunciation teaching and the many varieties of English. They frame this through English as an international language (EIL), where the main goal is mutual intelligibility rather than copying a native-speaker accent. They combined quantitative and qualitative methods with three groups: native American and British teachers (Inner Circle), Indian teachers (Outer Circle) and Iranian teachers (Expanding Circle).

The groups differed clearly in how far they accepted non-native varieties:

  • Iranian teachers were the most bound to native norms and favoured American pronunciation.
  • Indian teachers valued Indian English but still leaned towards British English.
  • Native teachers were the most open to other varieties.

The authors trace these patterns to "native-speakerism" and to textbooks that leave no room for non-native models. Both factors shape teacher identity and national education policy. They argue that raising awareness of English's global spread, for example through Jenkins' Lingua Franca Core, would let teachers aim for intelligibility instead of following one model blindly. The study matters because it shows how much a speaker's local context decides which form of a language they treat as "correct."

Key points

  • The sample had 112 native American/British, 120 Indian and 120 Iranian teachers, one group for each circle (Inner, Outer, Expanding; Kachru, 1992).
  • Data collection combined quantitative and qualitative methods.
  • Iranian (EFL) teachers showed the strongest orientation towards native norms and preferred American English pronunciation.
  • Indian teachers rated Indian English highly but favoured British English; native teachers were the most accepting of other varieties.
  • Jenkins' Lingua Franca Core (LFC) is proposed as a starting point for teaching pronunciation in an EIL setting.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Splitting participants by circle, instead of pooling them, revealed differences that one average would have hidden; this applies to any study of norm judgements.
  • I2. The LFC separates the few features that truly matter for intelligibility from many where local variation does no harm; this is a principled way to decide where strictness is worth paying for.
  • I3. The authors blame part of the norm-bound attitude on teaching materials that show only native models, so a skewed source shapes what users treat as correct.
  • I4. The paper insists that teachers' voices be heard and not assumed, meaning the people who hold a judgement should be asked directly rather than given a single imposed standard.
  • I5. Pairing numerical results with qualitative explanation lets the authors say both how much groups differ and why.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): report evaluation scores separately for texts from Inner, Outer and Expanding Circle writers, so a bias towards native-standard English shows up instead of being averaged away.
  • I2 (tokens): define a small core of distinctions the tagger and lemmatizer must get exactly right, and let non-standard spellings or forms outside that core normalize gracefully rather than count as failure.
  • I3 (tree): treebanks built mostly from native-standard text may teach the parser a similar narrow norm, so adding Outer- and Expanding-Circle English to training and test data could expose and reduce that bias.
  • I4 (learn): when the LLM teacher tiers or witness parsers disagree on unusual but intelligible English, keep the disagreement as a signal instead of forcing one "native" answer.
  • I5 (learn): pair agreement statistics on silver data with a short, explainable look at the disagreement cases, so repair rules come from understood errors rather than from counts alone.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Allameh Tabataba'i UniversityTehran · Iran2 works · 21 citations

Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Mohammad Khatib and Abbas Monfared. 2017. Exploring English Teachers' attitudes towards Pronunciation issues and varieties of English in three circles of world Englishes. Applied Research on English Language 6.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22108/are.2017.21349

@inproceedings{khatib2017exploring,
  title = {{Exploring English Teachers' attitudes towards Pronunciation issues and varieties of English in three circles of world Englishes}},
  author = {Mohammad Khatib and Abbas Monfared},
  booktitle = {Applied Research on English Language 6},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.22108/are.2017.21349},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22108/are.2017.21349}
}

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