The Impact of Day-to-Day Use of Multimedia by L2 Learners of English on the Comprehension of Regional Varieties

Changing attitudes towards Received Pronunciation (RP) and the increase in widely available authentic English via the Internet are among some of the major changes in second language acquisition (SLA). For a long time, RP was generally accepted as the easiest British accent to understand. However, with the recent evaluation of the intelligibility of RP by both natives (L1s) and non-natives (L2s) (Fraser Gupta, 2005, Ikeno and Hansen, 2007), this assumption is being increasingly questioned. In 2009, before multimedia was omnipresent in our everyday lives, an experiment carried out on 2 groups of French learners of English showed that understanding nine British and Irish accents is difficult for L2 learners of English (Edensor, 2010). Ten years later, the experiment was replicated to determine the impact of the Internet and multimedia boom on comprehension of the same regional accents and to find out if comprehension had improved. The results show that the Cardiff accent is still the most intelligible in 2019 and that regular use of multimedia has impacted and improved comprehension levels, but some accents remain difficult to process and understand.