The recent decades have seen enthusiastic calls for reconceptualizing English as a foreign language (EFL) education, taking into account the current socio-lingual status of English and how it is used genuinely for communication interculturally and internationally. However, a wide gap still exists between promulgation such as intelligibility over nativelikeness in pronunciation instruction and realities in the EFL classroom. The study investigated pre- and in-service teachers' cognition about accents and the incorporation of different accents in their classrooms. One hundred and sixty-six EFL teachers (89 pre-service and 77 in-service) from Hong Kong and Guangdong (a province in China) completed a questionnaire. Contrary to expectations, the teachers' overall attitude was neutral rather than positive towards General American (GA) / Received Pronunciation (RP)(1) associated with EFL teachers' accents and EFL education. Only two thirds of the teachers were certain about which accents to use and to teach in listening and pronunciation lessons (i.e. as many as one third were uncertain). Also, the participants were neutral about incorporating non-GA/RP accents into EFL lessons, with around one third objecting to doing so. Although no differences were found between pre- and in-service teachers' cognition, additional analysis revealed that teachers' individual background variables, namely teaching experience, self-rated language proficiency, and knowledge of sound systems (IPA for English; pinyin for Mandarin), have significant correlations with their cognition. Copyright ©2021 SAGE Publications.

The study reported in this paper adopted both direct (a large-scale questionnaire survey) and indirect (a verbal-guise test) measures to investigate gender differences in second language (L2) learners’ attitudes towards different English varieties in secondary schools in Hong Kong. The investigation considered various factors affecting students’ attitudes to language including their affective feelings, cultural identity, awareness of language variations, experience of language use, perceived intelligibility of English accents and, more importantly, situational language choices. Consistent with previous studies, the findings suggest that the female learners were more positively oriented towards native speaker (NS) pronunciation and tended to adopt it as their teaching model and learning target; they also had greater confidence than males in their ability to understand British English pronunciation. However, their greater sensitivity to NS standards was found to be limited to high-stakes English-speaking contexts. In contrast, male learners had greater tolerance or acceptance of local pronunciation. This paper concludes by discussing the implications of L2 learners’ gender differences in attitudes for English language education and the design of English language teaching materials and assessments.
[Copyright of System is the property of Pergamon Press. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.04.010]

There is broad agreement as to many of the segmental features of the Hong Kong accent of English: neutralisation of vowels which contrast in Standard Southern British English or General American, non-release of final stops, simplification of consonant clusters and devoicing of coda consonants. However, while it is apparent that there is no reason why these features should not co-occur within single words, such co-occurrences have not been identified in previous studies, perhaps because treatments of HK pronunciation have generally used lists of words and have thus elicited atypically careful pronunciation. The connected speech data used in the present study indicates that findings from word lists may not apply to more naturalistic speech. In this study, speakers produced many words with more than one segment sounding like another English phoneme, sometimes affecting all the segments of a word. Although overt signs of misunderstanding hardly arose, this indicates merely that the lack of such overt signals is no sign of acceptability. Arguments that Hong Kong English pronunciation should be viewed as 'phonological' in its own right are rejected as inappropriate, both on grounds that this interpretation is not supported by the phonetics of the data, and more conclusively on sociolinguistic grounds.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908310408666688 ]