The Impact of Including a British Accent in a National Listening Comprehension Test: Is it Fair?

This study investigates whether the presence of standard British accents in an English listening test has an effect on test-takers’ test performance. Fifty-two Korean high school students were tested with two sets of listening tests in different conditions, one in a North American accent only and the other one with a mix of both British and North American accents in five out of twenty items. Findings showed that the overall test scores of the two tests were not significantly different and consistent findings were found across all proficiency levels. On five items which were presented in different English accents, subscores of the single-accent items were generally higher than the subscores of the mixed-accent items. Further analysis on the listening prompt of the five items was carried out by comparing the length, speech rate, lexical difficulty, and attractiveness of distractors of the target items between the two tests. Findings showed that the differences found in item difficulty between the two tests were not associated with the length, speech rate, or lexical difficulty of the listening prompts, while the attractiveness of the distractors had a significant effect. Through these findings, this study suggests that introducing a British accent to current American-accent-only listening tests does not materially increase the difficulty of the test.