A comparative analysis on the comprehension level of Southern American English and Southern British English on the part of Spanish-native tertiary students

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to comparatively assess the level of comprehension of the Southern American English (SAE) and the Southern British English accent (SBE) which can be heard in the Shameless and Outlander series respectively. To do so, four carefully selected excerpts from hand-picked episodes of both programs were used in order to devise four oral comprehension tests aimed at measuring such level of understanding. Therefore, the students that were chosen ​ to undertake this research ​ are ​ a group of eight students from the History and Audiovisual Communication degrees with an intermediate level of English, who are native Spanish speakers with a B1-B2 level of English. Firstly, the oral comprehension tests were administered to the participants in order to determine by means of the answers provided in the tests their level of understanding of the SAE and the SBE accents. The results demonstrated the difference in the level of comprehension of these eight non-native speakers as well as the areas considered more intrinsically difficult by the participants in this study, which may lead to specific improvements in the teaching of these assets and to improved learning.