Presentation

It is close to us: Listener training on accented speech in the university workplace

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Abstract

Many European university campuses are linguistically and culturally heterogeneous contexts where employees and students encounter unfamiliar accents every day. The current paper describes 1-hour listener-training workshops provided at a French university to improve participants’ attitudes towards and ability to decipher different French or English accents. Workshop participants were university library staff, an under-researched demographic. The data (transcribed audio recordings of discussions) were gathered from two face-to-face language-focused training sessions and were analyzed thematically to determine whether (and if so, how) participants make connections between the training and their personal experiences of spoken language variation. To design effective training grounded in research, we need to understand the resources that listeners draw upon when facing with spoken language variation.

Keywords: listener training, accented French, workplace, pronunciation, second language

How to Cite:

Henderson, A. (2026). It is close to us: Listener training on accented speech in the university workplace. In P. Trofimovich, A. Bodea, T.-N. N. Le, R. Suzuki, & C. Teló (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (pp. 1–11). Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, October 2025. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.22580