A Study On Yunnan College Students’ Attitudes Towards Five English Varieties

As we know, the traditional Englishes are the British English and American English, the non-native English speaking countries always think these two types of Englishes are the standard Englishes, but with the long time development of English, English has a great change in many countries, various Englishes which have the special characteristics formed in many non-native English speaking countries, such as, European Englishes, African Englishes, Asian Englishes and so on. Many people are shocked by this change, Many English learners begin to doubt whether the traditional standard English should be learned or not? Whether the new English varieties should be learned or not? So from 2000 s, many scholars pay their attention to the different English varieties, they began to do some research on the different English varieties, especially the attitudes towards different English varieties. For the attitudes towards English varieties, many researchers have investigated the standard American and British Englishes, all the results of their investigation showed that English learners took standard and British Englishes as learning models, and they had extremely positive attitudes towards standard Englishes. But the attitudes towards some other specific English varieties have been ignored during the past decade, so in this thesis, Chinese students’ attitudes towards some other countries’ English varieties will be investigated.This study investigated contemporary college students’ attitudes towards American English(AE), British English(BE), Australia English(AusE), Singapore English(Singlish) and India English(Hinglish). The methodology that used were questionnaire and VGT, the questionnaire study included one hundred and fifteen students from Yunnan Normal University, the VGT study included forty students that have taken part in the questionnaire study before.The results of the questionnaire showed that participants evaluated AE and BE more favorably than Aus E, Singlish and Hinglish in terms of correctness, familiarity, pleasantness and acceptability, but did not show too much positive attitudes towards AE and BE, and show similar negative attitudes towards Singlish and AusE. The results of the VGT showed that the Yunnan Normal university respondents evaluated AE, BE, AusE and Singlish very similarly, they did not indicate any preference to any English accent in terms of solidarity and power, but they showed very negative attitudes towards Hinglish in terms of solidarity and power.