Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Personal and Professional Identities in the Teaching Profession
2. Accents in Britain and Linguistic Prejudice
3. Methodological Approach
4. Acceptance of Modification of Language
5. Aspiring to a Personally Idealised Teacher Identity
6. Abandoning the Personal Identity by Request
7. Concluding Thoughts and the Need for Standard Accents
References
Index

Promotional Information

Explores how British trainee teachers modify their accents to construct an identity considered ‘appropriate’ for their profession and discusses the impact on their personal identity.

About the Author

Alex Baratta is Lecturer in the English Language for Education programme at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK.

Reviews

This book is a thoroughly engaging examination of important practical and ethical issues affecting the British school system, and teachers-in-training in particular. It also provides a window on the complex status of regional and class accents in Britain … I encourage anyone interested in accents to read this book.
*Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development*

In this original work, Alex Baratta has contributed significantly to sociolinguistic understandings of accent and its relationship to teacher identity. He does this through a careful and comprehensive review of the literature, which both locates and informs the research on which the book is grounded. I would recommend this to any academic or student whose research intersects with accent, regional and class identities and the self-perceptions of teachers.
*David Hyatt, Lecturer in Education, University of Sheffield, UK*

This refreshing book raises some fundamental issues: the crucial importance of sociolinguistic reflexivity in teacher training, and the delicate play of accent inequalities affecting not just learners but teachers as well. Both are urgent and pressing educational matters; both remain largely unaddressed in scholarship and policy. Baratta breaks ground by bringing them up as relevant topics for debate.
*Jan Blommaert, Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization, Tilburg University, The Netherlands*