Attitudes Regarding the Realisation of the Lot Vowel in Advanced Serbian EFL Speakers

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of a survey, a forced choice questionnaire, which focused on the pronunciation of the lot vowel among first-year students of English Language and Literature, whose L1 is Serbian (n=102). This was part of a series of surveys designed to determine pronunciation preferences of Serbian English learners and the extent of the gradual drift towards American pronunciation that has been noticed in recent decades. The informants were divided into two subgroups according to their answer to the first question, which determined whether the participant was oriented towards GA (General American) or towards SBS (Southern British Standard). Different survey questions tested the pronunciation of the lot vowel in different contexts with different factors taken into account: number of syllables, frequency of the selected lot words, spelling, and the presence of the given word as a loanword in Serbian.
The results show that the much smaller subgroup that preferred SBS was much more accurate in their vowel choices, only occasionally opting for the GA-appropriate vowel in place of the SBS lot vowel (85% accurate), as opposed to the larger GA subgroup which displayed a lot of vacillation and uncertainty (29% accurate). The hypothesis that high frequency words will have a higher chance of being assigned the appropriate vowel was confirmed. However, other factors did not seem to have a noticeable effect. On the whole, the results support a previous observation that many advanced learners in fact speak an amalgam of British and American reference accents.