The Framing of a Preferred Variety of English by Pre-Service Primary School Teachers of English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The article presents a mixed-method study on how the preferred variety of the English language was framed by pre-service primary school teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The group of pre-service primary school teachers (further referred to as “participants”) was recruited at a large university in Norway and matched with the respective control group of non-teacher students enrolled in the English course at the same university. The participants and controls were asked to write a reflective essay on their preferred variety of the English language. The corpus of the participants’ and controls’ essays was analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of the quantitative analysis revealed that British English was preferred by 47% of the participants, who framed it via the frames “Films/TV”, “Sounds”, “Spelling”, “Teacher”, and “Visit”. Those findings were further discussed in the article.