CIRCE Online Training Event

🟢 Welcome and introduction
Dr. Silvia Calamai, CIRCE Coordinator

Overview of the CIRCE project, its goals, and why accent diversity matters in language education.

🎤 Talk – Dr. Amanda Cole (University of Cambridge)
“Understanding and challenging accentism in the UK”

Is there a correct way of speaking English? Do teachers have the responsibility to model “standard” English? Is “correcting” a student’s accent harmful or just protecting good standards and maximising their potential future opportunities? In this talk, I address these questions and give an overview of how linguistic discrimination operates in the UK, including within schools. I review both seminal and recent research, demonstrating a hierarchy of how UK accents are evaluated which disfavours regional dialects, particularly from urban industrialised areas. My research, which tested how intelligent, friendly and trustworthy people from southern England are judged to be based on their accent, demonstrates how accentism reproduces and reinforces inequalities, consistently disadvantaging those who are working class, from an ethnic minority background or from stigmatised or less privileged areas. Finally, I confront the pervasive idea that we can overcome the problem of accentism by expecting people to acquire and speak standard English. We will see how this idea is not practical and that the way we speak is an important part of who we are and not something we should have to forsake. I discuss how, instead, we can confront accentism and promote regional dialects.

🎤 Talk – Dr. Sonia Moran Panero (University of Southampton)
“Decolonising Voices in ELT: Confronting Linguistic Discrimination and Accent Bias”

Despite decades of scholarship in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and Global Englishes (GE) challenging the ideological dominance of the native-speaker model, such assumptions continue to shape professional and pedagogical practices within English Language Teaching. This talk draws from an international research project exploring de/colonial mindsets and practices in emerging ELT higher education contexts, which revealed the persistence of marginalising hierarchies of ‘desirable’ voices in the classroom. Responding to the need to increase practitioners’ awareness of the enduring effects of colonial ideologies surrounding language use and learning, and as part of our agenda of reciprocity, we returned to participating institutions to create spaces for critical reflection on alternative approaches to ELT and their classroom application. I discuss how the professional development sessions were designed to reconsider the roles of accent, linguistic agency, intelligibility, and identity in pedagogical practice, and examine how far these engagements fostered new understandings of linguistic diversity and informed the development of more inclusive and decolonial ELT materials. By collectively reflecting on the challenges and transformative potential of this work, the presentation seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions on linguistic discrimination, decoloniality, and teacher agency in contemporary ELT.

💬 The CIRCE Handbook: Practical insights and resources for teachers (CIRCE team)

This session introduces the CIRCE handbook, a vital resource for promoting linguistic equity in the classroom. Led by researchers from Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, it aims at providing language teachers with insights and practical strategies to identify and counteract language discrimination. We will share results, resources and activities from the project, focusing on inclusive pedagogies that value linguistic diversity and challenge biases.

🔵 Closing remarks
Dr. Claudia Soria, CIRCE