Pre-Servıce and in-Servıce Englısh Language Teachers’ Attıtudes Towards Englısh Dıalects and Dıalect Self-Awareness

Abstract

As the world globalized and the people on it became global citizens with cosmopolitan identities, it was realized that English that functions as a channel for communication, which is called ‘lingua franca’, is not expressed as a plural noun, it is not a single constitution, even though it’s not expressed as a plural. It has a variety within itself in terms of its acoustical and lexical features which brought the terms ‘accent’ and ‘dialect’ into the literature. They comprise an important field to investigate with the contribution of the speakers and teachers of English. As they are the transmitter of the knowledge of language, the teachers have a great vitality on the issue because their attitudes and perspectives are transferred to the learners directly. For that reason, this study inspects the attitudes and awareness of the prospective and practitioner teachers as well as their positions on the integration of accents in ELT before they take stage of education. A semantic differential scale enriched with MGT was applied to 50 freshman students, 50 senior students from ELT and 20 in-service teachers from School of Foreign Languages at Hacettepe University, while interviews were conducted with 19 participants from the same groups. Finally, American English was found to be the most favored accent, while native accents were preferred to the non-native ones in general. Furthermore, exposure at school or via media was observed to be significant determiners of attitudes and awareness. That is probably the reason of the fact that both of them increases going from freshman students to in-service teachers.