Attitudes of Libyan university students to different varieties of English

Abstract

Nowadays learning English is not only to communicate with native speakers, but also with non-native speakers. Crystal (2003) pointed out that the number of non-native speakers is much bigger than the number of native speakers. Since English has served as a unifying language, many people around the world have developed their own varieties of English, which are different from traditional standard varieties such as British English and American English. This means that English is spoken with different accents and dialects. As the ownership of English has no longer restricted to native speakers, the need to be exposed to a wide range of variation has become crucial. In order to achieve better communication in the wider community, students should be familiar with many varieties; otherwise, they will face difficulties in understanding other non-native speakers. The focus on the native pronunciation model for example will make students struggle to understand non-native accents. Results of previous studies confirmed this opinion. It has been argued that exposing students to different varieties of English would definitely help them understand various styles of speech and pronunciation and consequently improve their communicative skills with their counterparts. Fan et al's study (2018) revealed that the different accents of multinational speakers of English could be the most challenging obstacle for mutual intelligibility.