The university workplace is representative of international-ised/-ising workplaces in general, where different communities, languages, and cultures coexist. Staff encounter their colleagues’ and students’ accents – of Italian, of English, and in my case, French - and sometimes the result is that communication can be quite hard work. Even with the best intentions, sometimes we just cannot understand a speaker. However, when we think about spoken interactions, we have to accept that it is not just about how the speaker produces a language; the actions and skills of listeners should also be addressed. This flip or change of perspective begs two questions: can we, as listeners, learn to cope better with spoken variation? And if so, how?

To access this and next events, you should create an account on the H2IOSC Training Environment. Choose the course “Language and Accent Discrimination - Online Seminar Series”, activate code : PbK837GtE. Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.