With approximately 360 million L1 and two billion L2 English speakers, varieties of English proliferate (Jenkins 2015), but English language education overwhelmingly focuses on one or two privileged varieties (e.g. as Forsberg et al. 2019 note in Europe). As a result, learners are often ill-prepared to understand and negatively disposed towards speakers of varieties other than standardized US and UK Englishes (Jeong et al. 2021). Research-based teaching methods and tools to address this issue are limited, reflecting the longstanding monolingual bias in the study of second language acquisition (Ortega 2014).
Therefore, six easy-to-implement in-class lessons of approximately twenty minutes each were developed and delivered over three weeks of a first-year high school intermediate-level English class in Sweden (16- and 17-year-olds). These lessons drew on contact theory (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp 2006), especially indirect contact (White et al. 2021), and high-variability perceptual training (Baese-Berk et al. 2013) to provide both positive portrayals of Global English speakers from varied national and linguistic backgrounds and practice understanding them. Learners also engaged in discussion of questions that related speakers’ messages to their own experience. Pre-and post-tests of the class that completed these activities (N=27) showed improved comprehension of Global Englishes speakers who were not featured in the activities and rated the accents as more pleasant and easier to understand. A same-level class that took the pre- and post-tests but completed their regular class activities (N=18) showed no such improvement.
The presentation will begin by reviewing research demonstrating the need for such training, followed by an explanation of contact theory and high-variability perceptual training and how they can be used. We will then provide the actual training materials, the results of the study, and discussion of how additional materials can be developed, for example to address comprehension and attitudes relating to varied US Englishes.