Oyabola Folajimi Kehinde

PhD student at the Graduate School Empirical and Applied Linguistics from WiSe 2017/18 to SoSe 2019

Research Assistant, University of Münster

 

Dissertation

Attitudes of selected Nigerian students toward varieties of English accents

Even though few researches have shown that Nigerian speakers of English tend to have more positive attitudes towards English varieties from the inner circle than those from the outer and expanding circles, further investigation of their perception is needed. More specifically, there is a lack of conventional evidence regarding the attitude of Nigerians towards their own accent, a non-inner circle accent vis-a-vis varieties of English from the inner circle. There is a need to investigate which variety of English is most likely to act as a marker of linguistic identity in Nigeria. It is not always clear whether the subjects are able to differentiate succesfully between dialectal varieties of English from the inner circle. It is for this reason that this research includes a number of varieties of English.

The proposed PhD project aims to investigate the attitudes of selected Nigerian university students to four (4) varieties of English accents namely; British English, American English, Jamaican English, and Nigerian English. The study shall employ a range of direct (e.g. interviews and questionnaire) and indirect (e.g. the verbal-guise test) techniques of attitude measurement in order to obtain in-depth information regarding such perceptions.