THE PRESENCE OF THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH VARIETY AMONG THE FIRST- YEAR STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ZENICA

Abstract

Due to a large number of World Englishes spread around the world, the impact of the
‘core’, long considered norm-providing, English varieties is being slowly reduced. Still, the
influence of the two varieties, namely Standardised British English and Standardised American
English, seems to be spread across the world and throughout all the varieties, in particular the
peripheral or, in Kachruvian terms, outer-circle varieties. However, since these two varieties
differ in their demographic weight and the institutional support they get, they are not equally
represented, with American English being greatly present through the mass media and British
English being dominant in foreign language teaching. The simultaneous exposure to both
varieties is expected to lead to the inconsistent use of the varieties in different language aspects
by foreign language learners, Bosnian learners of English in particular. The current paper
reports on the project completed by the authors with the aim of investigating whether the firstyear students at the University of Zenica tend to use both varieties intermittently through
different aspects, namely pronunciation, spelling, grammar and vocabulary choice or whether
they consistently use only one of the varieties in different language aspects, for which the results
obtained by descriptive and inferential statistical analysis will be employed. Furthermore, the
research will provide an insight into the students’ attitudes regarding the use of the
aforementioned varieties. The main goal of the paper is to raise awareness of English language
teachers and students in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to prompt them to start thinking about the
language they use.

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