We know little about what raters rely on when participating in accentedness perception tasks as their qualitative comments are rarely scrutinised. At the same time, we know that (assumed) social information influences listener behaviour. This study investigates rater attitudes to and stereotypes about speakers of different varieties of English,…

Language policies have a better chance of succeeding if they align with the persuasions of the polity, and this is only more pronounced in the case of endangered languages, such as Te Reo (the Maori language) in New Zealand. There, a comprehensive suite of laws, policies, and programmes are in place to acknowledge and reverse the linguistic…

A survey of 781 elementary school teacher trainees at the University of Waikato (New Zealand) was undertaken to examine students' language background and indicators of language knowledge and language awareness, including: fluency in a language other than English; students' perceptions of their own second language fluency; exposure to foreign and…