College Students’ Perceptions of Instructors Whose Primary Language Is not English

It is common to see instructors at universities in America who are foreign born and, as a result, have a foreign accent. Since foreign accents can influence the perceptions of people, the researcher designed this study to discover any perceptions that college students may have toward instructors with foreign accents. In addition, the researcher wanted to discover if those perceptions influenced the students’ actions in class. In order to reveal these perceptions, the researcher surveyed 205 students both in-person and online. The researcher determined that although a majority of the participants had difficulty comprehending the lectures of instructors with foreign accents, most of the participants did not think of those instructors as less intelligent or as less effective compared to instructed with Mainstream American English (MAE) accents. Adding to that, the issues with comprehension did not lead most students to drop or skip the class of an instructor with a foreign accent. These results are essential to the field of Speech-Language Pathology because it will aid speech-language pathologists (SLP) who work with accent modification