Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics & Director of EDI for PPLS at University of Edinburgh.
he/him
LVC, digital (queer+youth+popular) cultures, 'MLE', & accent bias/linguistic discrimination - Edinburgh/London.
https://cilbury.wordpress.com/
Christian Ilbury
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↕️ In work for the Sutton Trust, we were concerned with how accent bias could function as a barrier to social mobility. We found - amongst other things - that 34% of ECRs from the North of England were worried that their accent could affect their ability to succeed in the future.
🧠 This is because there is a persistent accent hierarchy in the UK. When people are asked to imagine the voice of a High Court judge, they typically imagine someone who speaks Received Pronunciation ('King's English').
🔍 Nevertheless, we know that listeners do often base these judgements on accent. Research by ABB found that candidates with working-class LDN accents were judged as less suitable for the position of a trainee solicitor than in comparison to their peers who spoke standardised accents.
👊🏻 But we can address these issues. ABB found that raising awareness of accent bias was an effective first intervention and other work has shown that increasing diversity in accents/representation is important.
Just for the avoidance of doubt, any cuts on student numbers will almost certainly disproportionately affect WP and student groups that are *already* underrepresented.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the current financial crisis is really a Widening Participation crisis.
🗨️🗯️ Whilst accent can tell us quite a lot about a speaker's social background, it can't tell us anything about their intelligence, competence, or reliability.
Today is Social Mobility Day (socialmobilityday.com) and I'm down in London where I'll be giving a talk on "Accent Bias and Social Mobility" for a law firm.
A reminder of the headlines:
Post-doctoral Research Associate in Computational Linguistics. King's College London.
Salary: £45,031 to £47,379
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRU560/p...
Permanent, full-time Lectureship in Digital Culture and Society at UCL. Closing date 28 June www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
"Seeing whole areas of the country without an accessible Chemistry department, a Drama school, a Languages faculty – so that young students who can’t afford to move away from the parental home simply can’t consider those subjects. What a waste."
New blogpost from @gsoh31.bsky.social.
#UKHE
Social Mobility Awareness Day is about actively raising awareness of social mobility and the organisations that are committed to bringing about impactful change.
Apply now for the Post-doctoral Research Associate in Computational Linguistics role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
'Student numbers at UK universities should be reduced 30 per cent, with cuts targeted at institutions whose graduates go on to earn the least and those with the highest dropout rates, a new report has recommended.'
Policy Exchange is back on the warpath. 1/3
Dr Ian McCormick
Five-year tuition fee freeze, ban on franchising and introduction of new national entry test among other recommendations from Policy Exchange
