Non-Native English Speaker Accents in Swiss Elementary Schools: A Summary of Pre-Service Teacher Research

This paper summarizes the work carried out by pre-service elementary school teacher trainees at the Zurich and Schaffhausen Universities of Teacher Education whereby pre-service teachers discovered to which degree aspects of English as a Lingua Franca are taught to elementary school children in Switzerland. Some findings include: a mismatch between textbook recordings and the Englishes heard on a regular basis in Switzerland; a general openness towards various native speaker norms of English though not necessarily towards a non-native variety; and children's general feeling of not understanding various Englishes but actually performing just as well on listening tests of native and non-native varieties. This paper provides an overview of these findings in the hopes of filling a void in the research with younger learners of English.