Scholars advocate for more classroom attention to be paid to spoken grammar which deviates from commonly taught rules of writing.
However, these recommendations have not considered potential barriers that learners may encounter when using spoken grammar with
L1 speakers. We investigate one such challenge: the effect of learners’ accents and degree of accentedness on how their use of
these forms is subjectively perceived by L1 speakers. Ten non-expert raters rated the grammatical acceptability of four frequent
spoken grammar forms, read out by 15 speakers (10 L1 Tagalog, 5 L1 English) rated as having heavy, moderate, or no accents. A
one-way ANOVA revealed a significant effect of accent on grammaticality scores. Post-hoc tests showed a strong correlation between
accent and perceived grammaticality, with more accented speakers scoring significantly lower on grammaticality. The discussion
considers implications for spoken grammar teaching, and future research on the relationship between accent and perceived
grammaticality.
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