Attitudes of German Non-Native Speakers of English Towards British Varieties

A Case Study on the Example of the TV-Series ‘Downton Abbey’

Term Paper (Advanced seminar) , 2015 , 16 Pages , Grade: 2,7

Speech Science / Linguistics

The reason to conduct this study lies within the question of how German (and therefore non-native) speakers of English evaluate different ways to speak the English language. How do they judge its speakers to be as a person and is this dependent on the variety he or she speaks? It will be interesting to see whether what way of speech they personally prefer to speak or what kind of education they received influences their judgement of the speech samples presented to them. A lot of research of attitudes towards varieties for the educational sector has been done, but the aim of this paper is rather to show whether this attitude is also influenced by visual stimuli and how non-natives in Germany evaluate the different ways of speaking English, to have an impression of how these attitudes in everyday encounters may look like. Consequently, there are several hypotheses which are to be tested by two questionnaires and with the help of the TV series "Downtown Abbey".

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 A Case Study: Background and Conceptual Design

3 A Case Study: Data Collection, Analysis and Results

4 A Case Study: Discussion of Results and Future Prospects

5 References

• College: LMU Munich (Anglistik und Amerikanistik)
• Course: Accents of English
• Grade: 2,7
• Author: Marlene Weber (Author)
• Publication Year: 2015
• Pages: 16
• Catalog Number: V307145
• ISBN (eBook): 9783668052642
• ISBN (Book): 9783668052659
• Language: English
• Tags: Sprachwissenschaft, Anglistik, L2, attitudes, Received Pronunciation, Downton Abbey, German speakers of English, Accents, Dialects, questionnaires, Bellamy, Chiba, English, stereotype