“But that’s in bad faith”, a student retorted to my comment. “It’s done in bad faith”, they emphasized.

“How so?”, I asked back. “We just saw it from research”, I added, with a somewhat rising intonation.

“Well, it’s just… it’s bad faith… yeah”, the student shrugged with a tight-lipped, resigned smile.

            Hmm, is it? I asked myself.

For context: we were in the middle of discussing research on the acquisition of additional language (AL) phonology, particularly the correlation (or lack thereof) between variables such accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility, and its implication for teaching AL pronunciation. Following key findings, I argued that as future AL teachers, my students should and can teach towards improving foremostly their learners’ intelligibility (e.g., dela Cruz, 2022; Galante & Piccardo, 2021) instead of trying to reduce, (re)train, or correct their learners’ accents.

We had already established that accentedness (how close a speaker’s accent is to the local “native” accent, often exemplified by a standardized version) is not correlated to intelligibility (how well the speaker is actually understood, as evidenced by transcription tasks); however, accentedness may be correlated to comprehensibility (how easy or difficult to understand the listener perceives the speaker’s speech to be) (Derwing & Munro, 2005).

The class grasped this concept with ease, especially since we clarified how each of these variables are measured differently in research, which was key for them to tease through the nuance between what is intelligible (‘actual’) versus what is comprehensible (‘perceived’).

Despite showing that a ‘native speaker’ accent is an irrelevant goal for AL pronunciation teaching, I added that teachers may still want to pay attention to it in terms of how it may influence their learners’ lived experiences as plurilingual speakers, meaning users of multiple languages, or of multiple varieties of the same language. I emphasized that accent continues to be tied to different forms of social differentiation, and more importantly, discrimination. As examples, I mentioned how accent has been tied to AL speakers’ professionalism and gender identity (Ramjattan, 2020), global AL proficiency (Kachlika et al., 2019; here the researchers asked their participants “to self-assess their L2 English proficiency on a scale from 1 (heavily accented) to 9 (nativelike)” in order to “to gain a rough estimate of global language proficiency” [p. 17]), and in cases of accent hallucination, even to their race. Most importantly, I shared how highly automatic listeners’ judgements of an (un)standardized accent can be—its grammaticality or its aggressiveness (e.g., Weissler, 2021; Weissler & Brennan, 2020); that is, listeners cognitively take into account the perceived (racial and accented) identities of the speakers as soon as 200 to 300 milliseconds after they start hearing a speech when forming judgements regarding the speaker (see also Weissler, 2022, for an overview of how brain electrophysiological measures evince sociocognitive processing of the interfaces between language and identity).

I even shared a personal anecdote about an acquaintance, who, within an hour of meeting me for the first time, insisted that my French had a Hispanic accent. Naively, I entertained the conversation (hindsight is 20/20!). I politely disagreed, explaining that I didn’t, in fact, speak Spanish! I further explained that I had formally learned Parisian French as an undergraduate, though I did spend a summer in Trois-Rivières for a French immersion program, which might be why my accent sounds ‘confused’ between these varieties, not to mention the influence of my L1, Tagalog. I further joked that perhaps they thought that I was Hispanic or Latino because many people do make this mistake, given that I am Filipino (see also this book, The Latinos of Asia by Dr. Anthony Christian Ocampo). To my surprise, my new acquaintance doubled down—they were confident my French sounded Hispanic, and that I should trust them because they were studying linguistics (during this time I was not yet in graduate school for applied linguistics). What else could I say to that, right? It also didn’t help that I was a racialized AL speaker of French, while the acquaintance was a first language (L1) French speaker.

Following my example, I joked to the class that because raciolinguistic prejudices can be so spontaneous, one must be attentive to one’s judgements regarding peoples’ pronunciations and phonological behaviours, and that as future teachers, they can raise their learners’ awareness regarding this phenomenon. By raciolinguistic prejudices, I refer to judgements about, and discrimination against, racialized individuals’ language practices, which are rooted in white, monolingual hegemonic standards about appropriate language (use) (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa and Flores, 2017). And this is what my student thought was bad faith: that I assumed that my acquaintance was making raciolinguistic assumptions based on my race and/or accent. But I ask here again: was it in bad faith?

Even after I showed a body of research showing that accent is often tied to how individuals are socially (mis)judged.

Even after I showed that this phenomenon can be highly automatic.

Even after in previous classes we have already discussed that race and language often colour and co-articulate each other (Alim et al., 2016; or as Dr. Jonathan Rosa puts it, we look like a language, and we sound like a race).

Was my retrospection regarding my experiences with that newly met acquaintance done in bad faith?

What about listeners’—L1 users or otherwise—raciolinguistic perceptions of AL users’ speech? Shouldn’t this be the exemplar of judgements of “bad faith”?

*****

I, too, became resigned, and redirected the conversation—which seemed to have reached an impasse—back to the lecture. I concluded my point by reminding the class of the ‘so what’ of what we were discussing: that communication is a two-way street. That teaching AL speakers appropriate pronunciation skills necessitates also training L1 and AL listeners alike to listen better. Why should the onus of oral communication rest solely, or even mostly, on the plurilingual learner? Why can’t the listener do their fair bit of communicating in good faith—that is, by listening without anticipating anything regarding the intelligibility, grammaticality, professionalism, emotionality, or gender of their interlocutor’s speech based solely on the latter’s accent or race?

But then again, perhaps I’m asking the impossible here. Even I don’t know how to curtail raciolinguistic expectations that manifest before a full second! But that doesn’t mean that we, as language researchers, teachers, and teacher educators, shouldn’t at least try. After all, what can be better faith than at least trying?

That is except if we ask Grand Master Yoda, who will reprimand us that it’s either we do or do not, because there is no such thing as trying. In that case, I would argue that teaching how to pronounce better—in good faith—also presupposes teaching how to listen better. And in times when linguistic racism remains a pervasive challenge that many racialized AL speakers continue to experience, perhaps we can no longer afford to just try, and we simply must do.

References

dela Cruz, J.W.N. (2023). Plurilingual strategies for teaching pronunciation in TESOL: A research-based and action-oriented approach. In K. Raza, D. Reynolds, & C. Coombe (Eds.), Handbook for multilingual TESOL in practice. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9350-3_4

Derwing, T., & Munro, M. (2005). Second language accent and pronunciation teaching: A research-based approach. TESOL Quarterly, 39(3), 379–397. https://doi.org/10.2307/3588486

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149

Galante, A., & Piccardo, E. (2021). Teaching pronunciation: Toward intelligibility and comprehensibility. ELT Journal, 76(3), 375–386. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccab060

Kachlika, M., Saito, K., & Tierney, A. (2019). Successful second language learning is tied to robust domain-general auditory processing and stable neural representations of sound. Brain and Language, 192, 15–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2019.02.004

Ramjattan, V.A. (2020). Engineered accents: International teaching assistants and their microaggression learning in engineering departments. Teaching in Higher Education, 28(6), 1119–1134. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1863353

Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621–647. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000562

Weissler, R. E. (2021). Leveraging African American English knowledge: Cognition and multidialectal processing (Publication No. 28844409). [Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. https://dx.doi.org/10.7302/2706

Weissler, R. E. (2022). A meeting of the minds: Broadening horizons in the study of linguistic discrimination and social justice through sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42, pp. 137–143. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190521000131

Weissler, R. E., & Brennan, J. R. (2020). How do listeners form grammatical expectations to African American Language? University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 25(2), 135–141. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/286369652.pdf