Immediate and Long‐Term Effects of Prejudice Control Instructions to Reduce Accent Discrimination Against Second‐Language Speakers of English

Previous research has shown that non‐native accents can negatively affect listeners’ perceptions of lecturers’ competence, teaching quality, and hirability. Listener‐focused interventions, such as awareness‐raising instructions in the form of brief texts encouraging awareness and fairness have been shown to mitigate such biases immediately after the intervention, yet their long‐term impact remains unclear. This longitudinal study examined the immediate and long‐term effects of awareness‐raising instructions on evaluations of moderately Dutch‐accented English lecturers. A total of 349 highly proficient L2 English listeners with various nationalities were randomly assigned to intervention or control groups and evaluated lecturers at two time points, 12 weeks apart. Participants who received awareness‐raising instructions rated lecturers more positively on status, likeability, dynamism, teaching quality, and hirability at the first time point. However, these effects did not last after 12 weeks and did not transfer to a novel speaker at the second time point. These findings suggest that brief awareness raising instructions can temporarily reduce accent‐related bias but may be insufficient to produce lasting or generalized changes in evaluations.