The British Council recently formed a partnership with the ARDAA research network in English didactics to share the voices and work of different researchers in France in an accessible and engaging way. Our goal is that English teachers have the opportunity to hear from a wide range of academics working in the field and to experiment with their insights in their classrooms. These blogs do not necessarily represent official British Council recommendations but help feed lively debates and discussions around English teaching and learning.
In this blog, Dylan Michari, PhD in English phonetics and phonology, teacher at Université Paris Cité, shares his research into learner perceptions around accent and pronunciation.
For generations, pronunciation teaching has been guided by a simple idea: the closer students sound to native speakers, the better. In most classrooms, this has meant aiming for a consistent accent — usually British or American.
But today, in a world where English has become a truly global language, one question deserves to be asked: is it still useful — and even relevant — to expect learners to aim for a native accent? And, perhaps more importantly: do they actually want to?
The native speaker as a long-standing model
In many educational contexts, the native speaker has long been seen as the ultimate model. A “good” accent was one that erased traces of the learner’s first language and came as close as possible to Received Pronunciation (a perceived standard British accent) or General American (a perceived standard American accent).
This approach is reassuring. It gives teachers a clear target and offers students a concrete goal. And, in some situations, it is clearly called for: actors, learners in very specific professional contexts, or people working to preserve endangered languages may genuinely benefit from aiming for a native-like accent.
The problem starts when this ideal becomes the only legitimate goal for everyone.
When the accent ideal leads to pronunciation insecurity
Aiming for a native accent may sound motivating, but for many learners it quickly becomes discouraging. Research and classroom experience show that acquiring a truly native-like accent — without early immersion — is extremely rare. When students realise this, two things often happen: they lose confidence and speak less.
Instead of seeing pronunciation as a tool for communication, they start seeing it as a reminder of what they lack. In other words, the accent ideal can create pronunciation insecurity, where students feel judged not on what they say, but on how they sound.
The changing landscape of English
The reality of English use today looks very different from the reality that shaped traditional pronunciation teaching. With non-native speakers now outnumbering native speakers by around five to one, a growing number of English interactions take place in international settings such as business, academia, online communities and travel (British Council, 2023). As a result, English functions mainly as a lingua franca—a language that enables people with different first languages to communicate.
In such contexts, what matters most is not whether someone sounds British, American or Jamaican, but whether they can get their message across and adapt to different interlocutors.
And yet, in many classrooms, pronunciation goals have not fully caught up with this reality. Students are still implicitly told that their English will only be “good enough” once their accent sounds convincingly native.
What students are telling us
This tension between traditional norms and contemporary needs became very clear in a recent study I conducted with Olivier Glain among 359 French university students (Michari, 2025). When asked about their accent preferences, most students still pointed to British and American standards. This is hardly surprising: these are the accents they hear most in class, in the media and online.
But their comments told another story. Many students said they would like to discover more accents of English and to feel less pressure to sound “perfect”.
This is an invitation for us, as teachers, to rethink our habits: students are ready for a more flexible approach to pronunciation, even if our traditions have not always moved in that direction.
Rethinking pronunciation goals
If the native accent is no longer the most relevant — or desired — goal for most learners, what should we aim for instead? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between authenticity and intelligibility.
Instead of asking “Do my students sound native?”, we might ask: “Can they communicate effectively in the contexts they will actually face?”. In other words, “Are they sufficiently equipped to make themselves understood, and to understand, a wide range of speakers, native and non-native alike?”
