Abstrakt
Our proposed paper is part of a university grant programme in the field of teacher preparation and educational science. Specifically, our main research question is how to identify the language attitudes of our pre-service teachers and how to assist them in the process of reflexive sense-making of their second-language identity.
From a broader perspective, we strive to analyze the structure of their linguistic habitus in order to help them establish a sound and unbiased linguistic capital that they can pass on as language teachers on the linguistic market (Bourdieu, 1991). Our contribution focuses on the relationship between norm and the degree of its internalisation in the applied perspective of pre-service teacher training.
Herein, we adopt Milroy's (2001) approach which stipulates that standard can be viewed either non-ideologically or ideologically. The former is characterised as uniformity and invariance; the latter as a measure of achievement.
The elementary premise we base our preliminary research on is that the neutral (native) accents set the normative framework and consequently determine evaluative practices. The existing research on language attitudes in the Czech educational context has focused on students of English from the Faculty of Arts (Quinn Novotná, 2012), secondary school students (Jakšič & Šturm, 2017), as well as English speakers whose major is in fields other than English (Brabcová & Skarnitzl, 2018).
To the best of our knowledge, no study has been exclusively targeted at teacher trainees and their belief system vis-a-vis accent variation and attitudes towards accented speech. The data in the current quantitative descriptive study were amassed via a questionnaire in which 251 respondents, predominantly Czech undergraduate students of the Faculty of Education in Prague, took part.
The questionnaire was administered online and was divided into three parts: in the first section, personal information including brief language learning history was collected, the second part, Accent and me, explored the respondents' attitudes to their own accents and the last part, Accent and teachers, looked at the role accent(s) play in the teaching profession and how teacher trainees might address the question of accent variation in their future careers. The obtained results seem to testify against the broadly proclaimed prescriptive abstinence (see Coulmas, 1989).
They also suggest an inclination of our informants to the ideological perspective on language standard as a vast majority of respondents expressed their preference to acquire a native like accent. Simultaneously, the findings indicate the teacher trainees' familiarity with the intelligibility principle (Derwing & Munro, 2015).
Interestingly, accented speech did not appear to be a cause for concern in terms of losing respect in the teacher role in half of the examined sample. On the one hand, the data tend to confirm the deeply entrenched native English ideology, on the other hand, they may signal the growing acceptance of non-native teacher identities.