Foreign-born Teachers in the Multilingual Classroom in Sweden: The Role of Attitudes to Foreign Accent

Abstract The teaching profession is of particular interest as a testing ground for questions of the role of attitudes to foreign accented speech in a multilingual society, that is in virtually all societies. The school is a central institution of the nation state, and the goal of the school is to socialise young people to be productive, informed citizens and members of the local community. This paper will report on some results of a series of modified matched-guise tests measuring the attitudes of school principals, pupils and other judges in Sweden towards foreign-born teachers' language proficiency and suitability to teach in the Swedish school. The results indicate that all groups of judges are quite accurate in their judgements of degree of accentedness. Prosodic deviations seem not to play a more major role than segmental deviations in determining these judgements, contrary to our expectations. Listeners' judgements of grammatical correctness and of lexical richness did not, however, match more objective measures of these aspects of the speakers' proficiency. Rather, the degree of accentedness plays an important role in determining listeners' judgements both of these and other aspects of language proficiency and of suitability to work as a teacher.