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with English pronunciation per se can be problematic for learners in the long run. Due to the wide range of variation in English worldwide which learners are likely to encounter in the future (cf. Crystal, 2003; Galloway & Rose, 2015; Graddol, 2006; Jenkins, 2009c), learners are likely to fail to understand utterances if the potentially different manifestations of those utterances differ from the mental representations of the learner. For instance, if a learner is used to hearing the RP variant of the TH sound, the dental fricative, all the time as a result of their training in ELT and their exposure to this manifestation of the sound, they might have difficulties in rendering other manifestations of the sound with the voiced or voiceless TH phonemes during listening to spoken English. According to Wells (1982) the TH phonemes can be realised in various ways in native as well as non-native Englishes such as labio-dental fricatives /f/, /v/, dental plosives /t/, /d/ or alveolar fricatives /s/ and /z/. Therefore, learners who only recognise the sound, and consequently the word or utterance, in which the sound occurs, when it is realised as a dental fricative are likely to face difficulties in communication in international contexts. These difficulties are also likely to arise because such sound alternations can take place in potentially all other phonemes of English, and alternation can occur on the supra-segmental level of speech as well, in the rhythm, syllable structure or intonation of English.
In the present research, these comprehension difficulties are illustrated by the relatively low scores of learners in the tasks featuring accents they are not familiar with, namely the French accent, the Egyptian accent and also the Scottish English accent in the pilot study. These speech varieties display salient differences from the RP accent that learners are accustomed to both on the segmental level in terms of sound variation and on the supra-segmental level including rhythm and intonation. The Hungarian and American English accents appear to be positioned between the RP accent and the aforesaid non-familiar accents with regards to difficulty. Learners
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would be expected to be relatively familiar with these two pronunciations since the former is related to their own mother tongue, and the latter accent is widespread in the media where learners are exposed to English often, as it can be seen based on the questionnaires in Study One and Three and learners‟ accounts in Study Two. An explanation for this contradiction may be that in addition to learners‟ close familiarity with RP from ELT materials, the RP speakers in both studies display a certain degree of eloquence which facilitates comprehension for learners.
By contrast, the pronunciation of the GA speaker features some sounds that learners are less familiar with than the RP variants, even though the GA pronunciation has less such sounds than the unfamiliar French and Egyptian Arabic accents. Besides, both the GA and the Hungarian English pronunciation features spontaneous intonation which may be less clear to Hungarian learners who are used to the contrived eloquence of textbook RP (cf. Sections 3.3 and 3.6).
4.2.2 Disadvantages of a single pronunciation model
At first glance, the observation that the Hungarian secondary school learners in the study seem to find textbook-like RP accent considerably easier to comprehend than other speech varieties could imply that this variety is indeed the ideal target for learners of English who aim for a mutually intelligible pronunciation in English, as it is advocated by certain authors (cf. Prodromou, 2006;
Sobkowiak, 2005). However, besides the various burdens of such a pronunciation goal for learners, to be discussed in detail in Sections 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5, expecting learners of English to conform to RP for the sake of intelligibility is unreasonable for the following reasons. Firstly, as it was mentioned above, RP is a minority accent even among ENL speakers (Trudgill, 2002);
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therefore, the pronunciation of the overwhelming majority of native speakers is likely to be different from RP to some degree, which is due to widespread historical differences between dialects of the U.K. (Wells, 1982) and the diversity of English accents which evolved as a consequence of the early spread of English such as Australian English, New-Zealand English or the numerous varieties of American English (cf. Galloway & Rose, 2015; Jenkins, 2009c, Wells, 1982). Secondly, the English pronunciation of multilingual speakers of New Englishes has not been influenced by RP through ELT since those speakers acquire localised varieties of English in countries where English is used within the society, for instance, in India, Nigeria or the Philippines, where speakers are considered to be norm developers (Kachru, 1992). Thirdly, the pronunciation of EFL speakers also exhibits a high degree of variation due to the influence of L1 and the fluid, spontaneous and situational nature of ELF interactions, which also involve a great deal of variability in pronunciation. In the light of these considerations, it can be said that diversity in the pronunciation of English is the norm rather than the exception; therefore, designating RP as the target pronunciation for either language production or comprehension is not justified on the pretext of mutual intelligibility.
The findings that learners are the most successful in comprehending RP while they face difficulties with other speech varieties suggest that learners might face problems with the comprehension of spoken English outside school. The demographic tendencies in the global proportion of English speakers suggest that the number of ESL and EFL speakers is steadily increasing, while the number of ENL speakers is stagnating (cf. Crystal, 2003; Graddol, 2006), which means that variation in English accents is becoming more and more prevalent. For this reason, learners are likely to encounter a variety of different accents in the future when they
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communicate in English, which requires the skill to accommodate to interlocutors in terms of language production and comprehension as well (cf. Jenkins, 2012).
Communicative contexts where the participants include different speakers of English are also becoming increasingly prevalent as a result of globalisation and the global mobility of workforce, which means that ENL, ESL and EFL speakers form speech communities in a variety of locations worldwide (Galloway & Rose, 2015). This way, English is likely to develop local functions in more and more countries of the Expanding Circle, including Hungary, where English is traditionally used for international communication (cf. Kachru, 1992). Thus, Hungarian learners may encounter a range of different speech varieties of English in the future, for example, at multinational companies in Hungary where they would have to communicate with co-workers at their workplace or with colleagues at the same company outside the country.
Alternatively, they might also have to function in international environments abroad where English is either the local language or the shared means of communication. Therefore, a high degree of familiarity with a relatively rare speech variety such as RP has little adaptive value in communicative contexts which involve English speakers of various linguistic backgrounds.
Instead, Hungarian learners, as future users of English, need to anticipate that they will be exposed to various potentially unfamiliar pronunciations of English which they have to adapt to in terms of comprehension.
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