INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACADEMIC SELF-CON- CEPT AND FOREIGN ACCENT RATINGS

Even though it may have not been done in the same methodological design, recent research demonstrated that academic self-concept and foreign accent have an undeniable ele- ment in common – effect on learner’s self-confidence. Learners with a more positive academic self-concept are more likely to engage in challenging activities and be more willing to commu- nicate in a target language, while learners with a heavy foreign accent are more likely to devel- op speaking anxiety and reduce self-efficacy in interaction. Therefore, the present study aims at investigating the potential relationship between Serbian English major students’ academic self-concept and foreign accent ratings. A total of thirty female second-year students of the En- glish Department at the Faculty of Philology and Arts, University of Kragujevac, completed a questionnaire on self-concept and the recordings of their spontaneous speech were rated by five native and five non-native speakers of English, who were laymen in a linguistic sense. The results were then compared using a correlation coefficient, only to find a statistically significant positive correlation between academic self-concept and foreign accent ratings. The latter pointed to the overall conclusion that a more positive academic self-concept is correlated to higher foreign accent rating scores, which in turn may underline the fact that students with a more positive self-concept could be the ones developing a more native-like production through frequent and effective interaction unrestricted by lack of self-confidence. The research contributes to the in- vestigation of extralinguistic factors shaping the development of foreign accents and underscores once again that the nature of target language production is all but simple and static. Pedagogical implications related to the importance of enhancing Serbian EFL students’ self-concept draw attention to the potential re-evaluation of the current teaching practices.