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The internationalization of Anglophone universities could allow English-dominant students to benefit from experience with English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, but US students have often complained of difficulty communicating with such instructors, especially International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Research has largely focused on helping ITAs assimilate linguistically and culturally, although many applied linguists suggest that ITAs’ students would also benefit from training in skills for communication across linguistic difference, through attention to their language attitudes, familiarity with diverse Englishes, and communication strategies. We report on an intervention designed to address all three, here focusing on students’ willingness to engage in collaborative communication strategies. The intervention, conducted in a computer science department and reaching over 300 first-year students from varied linguistic backgrounds, included an online and an in-class component, each lasting about an hour. This brief intervention resulted in small but significant gains in domestic undergraduates’ (n = 174) stated intention to engage in collaborative behavior with their ITAs, although our detailed examination of qualitative responses suggests important areas for continued improvement of the intervention. We discuss the potential for such interventions to facilitate institutional and cultural change, encouraging the recognition of the shared responsibility for successful communication.

Research on communication difficulties between native and nonnative speakers (NNSs) has generally focused on NNSs. However, native speakers’ (NSs) level of familiarity with nonnative accents can also affect communication. This study investigates whether implicit training (exposure to Korean-accented English through sentence transcription) and explicit training (learning about linguistic differences with a focus on Korean-accented English) can improve NSs’ comprehension of Korean-accented English. Participants in both training conditions showed greater improvement than the control group on sentence transcription tasks but not on multiple choice questions that assessed comprehension of a brief lecture. The results replicate past findings showing the effectiveness of implicit training and provide novel evidence of the effectiveness of explicit training. This suggests that explicit training can be effective in improving NSs’ understanding of short utterances when the training ensures participants have learned the material.

Listeners often feel comfortable making non-linguistic judgements about speakers, including drawing conclusions about their education, economic status and personality based on their pronunciation. This is particularly true of reactions to non-native speakers (NNSs), whose pronunciation is often measured against native speaker (NS) norms. However, there are also several other factors that affect listeners’ evaluations, such as where they believe, or are told, the speaker is from and what this person looks like. Educators, researchers and NNSs themselves may wish to take an understanding of such factors into account when deciding how to respond to negative evaluations of non-native pronunciation. The chapter’s first section introduces key terms and approaches used to investigate attitudes towards NNS pronunciation and the findings from studies that employed these methods. The chapter’s later sections consider other social factors that affect how people evaluate and react to NNSs. Finally, the chapter suggests future directions for teachers and researchers interested in addressing issues related to listeners’ attitudes towards non-native pronunciation.