The Attitudes of ESL Learners towards Native and Non-native Variety English Accent. A Study of Two Universities

Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject Pedagogy - School Pedagogics, grade: A, , course: Mphil, language: English, abstract: This study is conducted to explore the attitudes of ESL learners towards the accent preference of English language. The present research talks about the concept of World Englishes and its variants. It also investigates the learners preference of three varieties of English language; American, British, and Pakistani English. This study employed the quantitative methodology in which the researcher adopts the cross-sectional survey design. The survey was conducted with 100 participants. The participants were chosen from the final year linguistics of the English department of the University of Sindh and Shaheed Benazir University of Nawab shah. For this study, the researcher adopted the two instruments to collect the data. The data were analysed through the SPSS by using descriptive statics analysis mode and it shows that learners are aware from the concept of World Englishes but they are tend towards standard English accent. The research objectives are: To investigate the attitudes of ESL Students of the English department of the University of Sindh and the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University of Nawabshah towards native varieties of English accent. (British and American). To investigate the attitudes of ESL Learners of the English department of the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, and Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University of Nawabshah towards a non-native variety of English accents. (Pakistani English). To investigate that to what extent ESL Learners of the English department of the University of Sindh and Shaheed Benazir are motivated to adopt Pakistani English accent.