ABSTRACT
We have been working as teacher educators in an English language and literature undergraduate course for teacher learners in Brazil, and we have reports from our teacher learners that they have difficulty understanding certain accents. In order to address this matter, we have explored opportunities to provide teacher learners with diverse, “less legitimate” forms of pronunciation, the ones from outside the Inner Circle (Kachru, 1985), away from Received Pronunciation of the British English and General American of American English, based on Rajadurai (2007), who brings a strong relationship between intelligibility and exposure to different accents. Here, we describe one of the activities that we planned for and carried out with our teacher learners, as part of a module focusing on listening and speaking skills, and on teaching methodology for future teachers of English. This listening task allows exposure to English from outside the Inner Circle and leads teacher learners to reflect about the “native” speaker construct and its absolute and unquestionable authority, as well as about the notion of intelligibility. As such, this activity provides content for teaching and discussing the English language from a global language perspective in teacher education contexts.
