Accent on Accents: Helping Learners Better Understand English Spoken by Speakers Having a Variety of Accents

Abstract

This article aims to introduce a few tools to help English (ESL/ELF/EFL) teachers improve their students’ understanding of a variety of accents in English. Related issues have been addressed by researchers, but the question of how to help L2(+) listeners with a good level of comprehension of ‘standard’ varieties of English, to better understand an unfamiliar accent, has not been widely studied. This paper will introduce several methods that were tried in a classroom setting, with differing results. A global approach, as opposed to a segmental approach, seems to be more promising, as results were better for the techniques that focused more on longer passages, as opposed to isolated words or phrases. This article will open the discussion about how language teachers and researchers can continue to improve methods used to help learners increase their understanding of unfamiliar accents.