Japanese attitudes toward English accents - Wiley Online Library

Japanese attitudes toward English accents REIKO CHIBA,* HIROKO MATSUURA** and ASAKO YAMAMOTO*** ABSTRACT In Japan, students seem to resort to American English when it comes to deciding the model for their English. This study focuses on the attitudes of Japanese university students toward varieties of spoken English. The study is based on the results of our previous research (Matsuura er al. 1994), which showed the preference for American English among Japanese students. The aim of this study is to examine the relation between the acceptance of varieties of English spoken by native and non-native speakers and the attitudes toward people, culture, and English learning. The results obtained have demonstrated the following points: first, subjects with more instrumental motivation are more positive towards non-native English accents than those with less instrumental motivation; second, the level of subjects’ respect for indigenous languages affects their attitudes toward non-native English accents; and third, the subjects’ familiarity with accents has an influence on their acceptance of varieties of English.

INTRODUCTION

At present, English is used practically all over the world. According to Kachru (1992), users of English around the world total roughly 750 million, among whom 350 million are native speakers of English and 400 million are non-native speakers. English is the principal means of intercommunication, not only among native speakers but also between native speakers and non-native speakers. English is also used as a lingua franca by many nonnative speakers with different language backgrounds. Linguistically,Japan is categorized as one of the EFL countries where English is learned as a mandatory subject but is barely used outside the classroom. The English-speaking population is very small, and most Japanese use the Japanese language at home. However, with Japan’s economic and technological progress, more and more Japanese have been exposed to different varieties of English in their work settings or on other special occasions, like traveling abroad or education,in a foreign country. Despite this exposure, it seems that in many places non-native English is not always perceived positively by the Japanese. Attitudinal factors have received a great deal of attention in the fields of sociolinguistics and second and foreign language research since the early 1960s, when Lambert and Osgood conducted rigorous studies with their associates. Lambert et al. (1960) developed a matched guise technique.This technique included a set of adjectives and was employed by having a bilingual person read a passage in different language varieties. The subjects were asked to listen to the passage read in two different varieties and to react on the adjective chart. The listeners did not know that the passage was actually read by the same individual, and therefore they reacted differently, depending on which language was used. Osgood (1964) provided a good framework for developing an evaluation chart. The technique used by Osgood was called the semantic differential procedure, which used a list of opposite adjective pairs arrayed in bi-polar rating scales. In this scale, adjectives were *Faculty of Liberal Arts, Asia University. 5-24-10 Sakai, Musashino, Tokyo 180,Japan. **Faculty of Liberal Arts, Kaetsu Women’s College, 2-8-4 Hanakoganei Minami-cho, Kodaira. Tokyo 187, Japan. ***Department o f Rehabilitation Engineering, The Polytechnic University, 4-1- 1 Hashimotodai, Sagamihara, Kanagawa 229, Japan. QBasilBlackwellLld. 199.5. 10RCowley Road.OxfordOX4 1JF.UKand 238 MainStreet,Suite 5Ol.Carnbridge MA02142,USA

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Reiko Chiba, Hiroko Matsuura and Asako Yamamoto

grouped into three factors: 1) Evaluation (e.g., good-bad, pleasant-unpleasant, and positive-negative), 2) Potency (e.g., strong-weak, heavy-light, and hard-soft), and 3) Activity (e.g., fast-slow, active-passive, and excitable-calm). Subsequently, a number of attitudinal studies using the Lambert and Osgood models were developed.For example, Carranza and Ryan (1975) examined evaluative reactions of Mexican-American and Anglo high school students toward speakers of standard English and standard Spanish.The results indicated that Spanish was rated higher in the home context, whereas Enghsh was rated higher in the school context. Oller et al. (1977) conducted a study on the effect of Chinese students’ attitudes on proficiency in ESL. Generally, those students who were more integratively motivated performed better on a cloze test than those who were less integratively motivated. In France, Flaitz (1988) investigated French attitudes toward Anglo-American ideology, culture, people and language. The elaborate research showed some notable findings: first, British English received more favorable attitudes than did American English; second, the age, occupation,and educationalbackground of the subjects appeared to account for variation of attitude; and third, there was little or no relationship between motivation to study English and attitude toward the language. While many studies have attempted to measure subjects’ attitudes toward native-speaker English, there appear to be few studies which deal with non-native-speaker English. Our previous study (Matsuura et al., 1994) investigated Japanese college students’attitudes toward six Asian accents of English as well as toward an American accent. The statistical data analyses led to some interesting findings. First, the subjects viewed American English more positively than they viewed the other varieties. Second, the subjects’reactions to the spoken accents did not correlate with their overall Enghsh proficiency at a significant level. Third, the stronger the subjects’ preference for native English, the more positive their attitudes toward the American accent and the more negative toward the nonnative varieties. Fourth, subjects who had a stronger instrumental motivation in learning English did not tend to show greater discrepancies in attitudes between the native accent and the non-native accent. Specifically, subjects who had an idea that they study English because it is required for graduation tended to respond more positively to non-native varieties of accents. And finally, subjects who thought that in any country the native language should be most respected tended to accept the non-native accents as well as the native accent. Our current study is based on the results of this previous research (Matsuura et al., 1994). The hypotheses to be tested are: 1) The subjects’ familiarity with accents will affect their acceptance of different varieties of English. Subjects will value an accent more positively when they can identify what nationalitya speaker of that particular accent is. 2) Subjects with more instrumental motivation will tend to be more positive toward the non-native English accents than those with less instrumental motivation. 3) The level of subjects’ respect for the indigenous language will affect their attitudes toward nonnative English accents. Specifically, subjects with more respect for an indigenous language will tend to respond more positively toward non-native English accents.

METHODOLOGY

The subjects were 169 Japanese university students, and experiments were conducted at two universities. Ninety-seven subjects were majoring in English and the other 72 were Q Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995

Japanese attitudes toward English accents

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majoring in international business. Most of the subjects received six years of English education in junior and senior high schools as one of their school subjects. Six years is the typical length of formal English study prior to university in Japan. A recording was done of nine male speakers. Three of them were Japanese university students. Another three were native speakers of English: two Americans and one British person. The other three were non-native speakers of English from countries where English is spoken as a second language:namely, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Each speaker read the same short English passage. Two types of questionnaires were given to the subjects in Japanese. First, the subjects were asked to listen to the tape and indicate their impression of each speaker among ten sets of adjectives arrayed in bi-polar rating scales (Questionnaire A). To avoid a left-right bias, the positive and negative adjectiveswere scrambled. The subjects were also asked to choose the home country of the speakers from among six countries -Japan, the USA, the UK, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. The subjects were then asked to answer another questionnaire concerning their general ideas about foreign languages and language learning using a seven-point rating scale ranging from ‘completely agree’ to ‘completely disagree’ (Questionnaire B). The questionnaire consisted of 21 statements such as ‘I study English because it is required for graduation’ and ‘I am interested in the English of Singapore and India.’ RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The Japanese university students responded more positively to the three native accents than to the non-native accents. Table 1 shows the means of total scores for the individual speakers. As Table 2 indicates, native accents were perceived positively by the subjects overall. On the other hand, the subjects viewed the Japanese accents and the remaining non-native accents less positively. It is evident that the subjects distinguished favorable accents from less favorable ones. The subjects’ relative familiarity with the accents probably affected these different reactions to the varieties.This point relates to our first hypothesis. In order to obtain information on the extent to which the subjects could guess nationalities of the speakers - in other words, to what extent they were familiar with particular accents - we asked the subjects to indicate the nationality of each speaker immediately after they listened to him reading the Table 1. Means of total scores

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Speaker’s nationality

Mean

S.D.

3.UK 9. USA 6. USA 5. Japan 2. Japan 4. Hong Kong 1 . Sri Lanka 7. Japan 8. Malaysia

57.58 50.81 49.32 41.83 37.55 36.59 35.05 30.05 29.96

8.50 8.88 8.9 1 8.05 6.81 8.08 6.82 6.84 7.02


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Table 2. Means of native, Japanese and other non-native accent groups Group

Mean

S.D.

Native Japanese Other non-native

52.57 36.45 33.56

6.62 4.74 5.24

passage. The percentages of the subjects who indicated each nationality are shown in Table 3. Some interesting points emerged: first, quite a number of subjects could guess who the native speakers were, although many of them seemed to have difficulty identifymg whether the speaker was American or British. Second, the subjects tended not to be very familiar with Japanese accents. Only half the subjects could correctly guess that Speakers 5 and 7 were Japanese. Third, many subjects seemed to misidentify the nationalities of the nonnative speakers, excluding Japanese. They could only point out that the speakers were either from Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, or Malaysia, and the diversity of the percentages implies that many of them did not know which was the correct nationality. In general, for these Japanese subjects,identifymg native accents was easiest, followed by Japanese accents, and then the other Asian varieties. These results may stem from the fact that American or British English taped materials are usually used as an instructional model in classrooms, while Japanese is used by Japanese teachers in explaining grammatical matters and meanings of English texts. Japanese students tend to think that AmericanA3ritish English is ideal, and they may not have many opportunitiesto hear their Japanese teachers speak English.Furthermore,since Japan is one of the EFL countries, they normally do not have a chance to hear other varieties of English either. Therefore, it is quite understandable that the subjects easily guessed who the native speakers were, and that they had some difficulty identifying the nationalities of the Japanese and the other Asians. Table 3. Guessed nationality Correct nationality

Japan

USA

Guessed nationality (%) UK Sri Lanka Hong Kong

3.70 *81.71 0.60 8.88 *48.40 2.37 *53.01 2.38 0.00

0.62 0.61 62.50 1.18 4.82 *23.67 0.00 0.00 *32.62

0.62 0.00 *36.31 4.73 9.04 24.26 0.60 0.00 38.35

Malaysia

~~

1. Sri Lanka 2. Japan 3.UK 4. Hong Kong 5. Japan 6. USA 7. Japan 8. Malaysia 9. USA

*58.64 4.27 0.00 19.53 4.82 11.24 14.46 38.69 2.7 1

7.4 1 6.71 0 .oo *36.69 2 1.69 21.89 12.65 27.98 1.74

Numbers with asterisk are the percentages of subjects who guessed nationalities correctly 0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995

29.0 1 6.71 0.60 28.99 10.81 16.57 19.28 *30.36 0.84


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A T-test was used to validate our first hypothesis, ‘The subjects’ familiarity with accents will affect their acceptance of different varieties of English.’ The scores for the accents of Speaker 6 and Speaker 7 were used as representatives for native-speaker accents and Japanese accents respectively. Because the accent of Speaker 6 was rated lowest among the three native accents and the accent of Speaker 7 lowest among the three Japanese accents (see Table l),it would be interesting to test the effect of familiarity with the accents over the rating of these. The mean score of the subjects who guessed that Speaker 6 was either American or British was significantly greater than the mean score of those who did not (see Table 4).It is assumed that the relative familiarity with native English affected the general favorableness toward the accents. On the other hand, the mean score of the subjects who could guess Speaker 7 was Japanese was not significantly different from the mean score of those who could not. Although the subjects were somewhat familiar with the Japanese accent, the familiarity did not result in significantlyhigh ratings of the Japanese accent. This is probably because the subjects saw the Japanese accent as familiar but not quite ideal. Our first hypothesis is partially proved, in that subjects who could identify native accents rated them positively,and in that not only this familiarity with a particular accent but other factors also seemed to be relevant in accepting accents. Table 4. T-test on the effect of familiarity

6. USA (native) 7. Japan

P

t

df

-3.69 1.87

167 p < 0.01 165 n.s.

The second and third hypotheses of the study were that ‘Subjectswith more instrumental motivation will tend to be more positive toward the non-native English accents than those with less instrumental motivation,’and ‘The level of subjects’respect for the indigenous language will affect the subjects’ attitudes toward non-native English accents’ respectively. Factor analyses and Pearson Correlation Coefficients were used to validate these hypotheses. Factor analyses were conducted to determine the dimension underlying the ratings given for Questionnaire B by the subjects.The rotated factor patterns are shown in Table 5 . The results of the factor analyses indicate that eight factors underlie the scales employed in Questionnaire B, as shown in Table 6. The eight factors identified are named as follows: ‘Preference for AmericanBritish language, people, and culture,’ ‘Interest in learning and using English for specific purposes.’ ‘Concern for good English in the school context,’ ‘Importanceof the indigenous language,’‘Benefitof high English proficiency,’ ‘Concern for nativism in language,’‘Preferencefor English books,’ and ‘Instrumentalmotivation in learning English. It was assumed that a subject’s attitude toward the English varieties could be observed in the difference between hidher total score for the native English speakers and that for nonnative English speakers (N-NN). That is, a great N-NN differential meant that the impression for spoken native and non-native English was more extreme. On the other hand, the smaller the N-NN differential, the smaller the positive and negative difference. To reveal the relationships between the N-NN scores in Questionnaire A and each factor in 0 Basil Blackwell Lld. I995


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Table 5. Rotated factor patterns ~~~~

Factor 2

Factor 1 ~~

6. 10. 9. 13. 3. 19. 12. 11. 1. 15. 14. 20. 18. 8. 4. 7. 2. 17. 21. 16. 5.

0.64506 0.57513 0.54400 0.50044 -0.32252 0.01634 0.09614 0.06690 0.03959 0.13662 0.29024 0.03406 -0.02939 0.35256 0.04687 0.01695 -0.22171 0.03170 0.09674 -0.05553 -0.17807

~

Factor 3

Factor 4

Factor 5

Factor 6

Factor 7

Factor 8

0.06806 0.04327 0.22809 0.17770 -0.083 11 0.13863 0.09510 -0.07366 -0.07949 0.69487 0.60766 0.10859 -0.02069 0.24438 0.02659 -0.08362 0.04191 0.16624 0.01624 -0.00476 -0.07097

-0.03927 0.01849 0.05654 0.27927 0.08600 -0.05623 -0.02028 0.1 1953 0.03476 -0.03758 0.15685 0.78519 0.3631 1 0.00547 0.08186 -0.01909 -0.06773 0.04453 -0.05590 -0.1 3 188 -0.05096

-0.1 1280 0.29933 -0.08057 0.14884 -0.1 3960 0.21149 -0.10507 0.1 2996 0.0 1046 0.09271 0.06079 0.01296 0.137 12 0.4 1269 0.37782 -0.16862 0.20826 0.35864 -0.1 3645 0.10050 0.06296

-0.063 15 -0.04429 -0.11459 0.22792 0.05559 -0.027 18 0.10684 0.1 1605 -0.0047 1 -0.09 161 0.04375 0.03528 -0.12990 0.22004 -0.02243 0.53518 0.50802 -0.09719 0.10500 0.19788 -0.1 1942

0.14542 -0.04 129 0.0606 1 0.20699 0.14133 0.03679 0.08787 -0.03933 -0.03084 0.01003 0.08 159 -0.02032 -0.12097 -0.06167 0.03247 0.16572 0.04947 0.55126 0.39038 0.32173 -0.02136

-0.08085 -0.06 138 -0.045 16 -0.00969 0.09952 0.24476 0.121 11 -0.07935 -0.04331 -0.10500 -0.00804 -0.14680 0.08504 0.02223 0.041 59 -0.15981 0.02231 -0.33920 -0.0 15 18 0.09822 0.64756

~

-0.17796 0.16025 0.19060 0.15833 0.04481 0.72035 0.51281 0.49758 -0.46314 0.23571 0.00883 0.07285 -0.09748 0.03904 0.06025 0.04348 0.23549 -0.00008 0.15271 -0.07148 -0.02795

Questionnaire B, Pearson Correlation Coefficientswere calculated.The results are shown in Table 7. Subjects who agreed to the item in Factor 8, ‘As long as it is understood, incorrect English is acceptable,’ tended to show relatively positive reactions to the non-native accents. This idea might relate to an instrumental motivation of the subjects in learning English. Although there was only a week negative correlation between Factor 8 and N-NN, it might be said that subject with more instrumental motivation seem to react to non-native accents and native accents in a similar manner. Therefore, evidence to support the second hypothesis was found. As for the third hypothesis, the correlation between Factor 6 and N-NN indicated the possibility of its validity. The items in Factor 6 are ‘There is too much English in Japanese TV commercials’and ‘I am interested in the English of Singapore and India.’ Subjects who agreed with these ideas tended not to differentiate their reactions between non-native English and native English accents. In other words, N-NN was smaller than it was among those disagreeing with the ideas. It can be said that subjects who supported the indigenous language, or showed interest in indigenous varieties of English, perceived accents of nonnative speakers in the same positive way as they did those of native speakers. Other findings supported the results of our previous study. Factor 1can be categorized as an indication of subjects’ preference for British or American culture and people as well as of pan-Englishism. The items are as follows: ‘I prefer friends from the USA or UK to those 0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. I995


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Table 6. Factor analysis on Questionnaire B [factor loading: >0.4) Factors

Mean S.D.

Fucror I: Preference for AmencadBritish language, people, and culture 6. I prefer friends from USA or UK to those from Asia. 10. English is the best foreign language to learn. 9. I would choose USA or UK for studying or traveling. 13. English should be used as a world lingua franca. Fuctor 2: Interest in learning and using English for specific purposes 19. I want to get acquainted with people from different countries. 12. I am willing to go abroad if appointed to work there. 1 I . 1 am willing to respond if spoken to in English. 1. I study English because it is required for graduation. Fuelor 3: Concern for good English in the school context 15. I want to get good grades in English. 14. I envy those who can pronounce English like an American or a British person. Factor 4: Importance of the indigenous language 2 1. The indigenous language is the most important in any country. Fucror.5: Benefit of high English proficiency 8. High English proficiency is advantageous for job hunting. Fucfor 6: Concern for nativism in language 7. There is too much English in Japanese TV commercials. 2. I am interested in the English of Singapore and India. Fucfor 7 Preference for English books 17. It is possible to obtain more knowledge by reading English books. Fucfor8: Instrumental motivation in learning English 5. As long as it is understood, incorrect English is acceptable.

4.8 1

1.07

5.19

1.08

5.79

1.30

2.29

1.34

5.86

1.18

4.09

1.28

4.78

1.37

4.70

1.55

Table 7. Pearson Correlation Coefficients between factors and N-NN

r

P

FI*

F2

F3

F4

F5

F6

F7

F8

0.34 p