Handbook on Counteracting Accent Discrimination Practices in Education

This handbook is written especially for language teachers and educators who work with students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Basically, it explains the project's outputs and the useful resources it created for teachers and educators. 

The primary goal of this handbook is to offer original teaching resources featuring practical examples, strategies, and activities for addressing accent discrimination in the classroom, fostering enhanced tolerance and inclusion, particularly in multilingual and multicultural classrooms. These materials will enable educators to present the concept of accent and linguistic bias in their classrooms in an engaging and lively manner. In essence, this handbook seeks to develop in secondary school teachers and students the critical awareness required to evaluate their own responses to accent variation and the ability to direct their behavior and actions toward an overall tolerance and acceptance of linguistic diversity. 

The handbook is divided into the following sections. After a foreword by Kurt Kohn, Professor Emeritus of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, and this introductory section, Part I briefly describes the sociolinguistic context of each partner institution of the project (Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, and Portugal) and some relevant data collected from the project’s outputs in each of those countries, such as the Verbal Guise Tests, the textbooks analysis, the metalinguistic interviews, the podcasts, and the linguistic autobiographies. After that, Part II provides the practical resources to be applied in the classrooms: Part II.A presents the resources for L2 English classes; Part II.B displays resources for the L1 languages of the project’s partners (Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Portugal); Part II.C supplies printable materials which may be used to drive actions, create awareness and inform target audiences on how to counteract accent discrimination in schools and classrooms. After some closing notes, a multilingual glossary defining some key terms used in the handbook is supplied. Readers will also find links to translations into Italian, Bosnian, German and Portuguese of the following sections: Introduction, Part I and Conclusion.