Sometimes a study pops up on your screen that feels uncomfortably familiar. This one does exactly that, because it holds up a mirror to a belief many in ELT quietly know is still shaping classrooms, hiring & professional identity: the idea that “nativeness” signals better teaching.
The study
The researchers used a sequential explanatory design (a mixed‑methods approach where quantitative findings come first & qualitative analysis is used to explain them) to explore how Moroccan-accented English teachers (MAETs) are perceived compared to teachers using a native-like American accent (NAETs).
Two strands of data were combined:
1. A Matched Guise Experiment (MGE)
140 respondents (80 high school students & 60 teachers/trainees) listened to three recordings of the same text:
- one in a Moroccan-accented English
- one in an American accent
- one “distractor” voice to mask the design
Participants rated each speaker on professionalism, experience & proficiency using a 7‑point scale.
2. A Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
Using Van Dijk’s framework, the authors analysed:
- a job advert from the American Cultural Association
- a teacher‑description page from the American Language Centre Casablanca
Both texts were examined for how they construct, reinforce or legitimise “nativeness” as a professional ideal.
The findings
The numbers are stark.
- The Moroccan-accented guise received a mean rating of 3.27.
- The same speaker using an American accent scored 6.20.
- The difference was statistically significant.
Affiliation mattered too (i.e. which group the participants belonged to):
- Students rated the NAET guise 6.44, the MAET 2.70.
- Teachers also preferred the NAET guise (5.96 vs 3.84), though less dramatically.
- MANOVA results showed affiliation explained 91.2% of the variance in evaluations.
The CDA revealed a similar pattern:
- Job adverts foreground “native English speaker” before qualifications or experience.
- Teacher‑description pages implicitly equate professionalism with nativeness.
- Non‑native teachers are rendered invisible, unnamed or positioned as “less than”.
Together, the two strands show how accent bias operates both in individual perception & institutional discourse.
Relevant context
This study sits squarely within long-standing critiques of native-speakerism (Holliday 2005; Phillipson 1992) & echoes decades of research showing that accent often overshadows actual teaching competence (Moussu 2006).
It also aligns with work in Global Englishes & ELF (Seidlhofer 2011; Galloway & Rose 2018), which argues that intelligibility—not imitation of an Inner Circle norm—is what matters for communication.
A simple example:
A teacher who says “I didn’t went yesterday” is making a grammatical error that affects meaning.
A teacher who pronounces “worked” as /wɜːrkɪd/ instead of /wɜːrkt/ is not.
Yet the second “error” might be judged more harshly because it signals “non-nativeness”.
Teacher Takeaways?
The study doesn’t give classroom advice, but it clearly demonstrates that accent bias distorts perceptions of competence. The logical classroom implication is:
If learners are judged unfairly based on accent, teachers should focus on what actually supports communication — intelligibility, clarity & listener effort — not imitation of a native norm.
- When teaching pronunciation, prioritise intelligibility over accent mimicry. Students don’t need to “sound native” to be effective communicators.
- Make accent bias explicit in teacher education. If we don’t name it, we can’t challenge it.
- Audit your own materials & language. Do they implicitly privilege nativeness over expertise?
Biases around accent are deeply social, not linguistic. But they shape careers, confidence & classroom dynamics in ways we can no longer ignore.
How do you address accent perceptions in your own context?
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