- Rahul Chakraborty (a professor at Texas State university) wrote an excellent article called A Short note on Accent-bias, Social Identity and Ethnocentrism. This article explores concepts such as social identity theory (S.I.T.). This is a theory that states how people will identify themselves with others who share similar traits as them. SIT explains that this tendency to categorize ourselves gives us a feeling of familiarity and belongingness. People who are in the same social group of ours form “ingroups” and the people that are not form “outgroups”. Rahul then talks about how this is related to a topic called ethnocentrism. Essential the meaning of this is that members of ingroup believe that their group is centric to everything. This ethnocentrism when taken too far can lead to people discriminating against outgroups Accents are a typical characteristic that people tend to categorize each-other with. The author then offers some tips that can help mitigate the issue of accent discrimination. Some of the tips included the use of speech language pathologists to help nonnative speakers improve their pronunciation in their nonnative language. Another tip was hiring more diverse staff in universities so that students become more accustom to working with people who have a nonnative accent.
This article is an important part of my portfolio explains some of the psychology involved in unconscious bias. This article has taken my understanding of this topic to a much higher level and was crucial to my final project in this class. Another thing I found useful about this article is how it referenced and explained several studies that were conducted which validate his arguments. I found this article through the use of the advanced search on Syracuse Summons library.
Chakraborty, R. (2017). A Short note on Accent–bias, Social Identity and Ethnocentrism. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 8(4), 57. doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.4p.57