*🎓 *We are happy to announce the next and last webinar in the CIRCE
online seminar series organized by the CIRCE
<https://www.circe-project.eu/> project in collaboration with DFCLAM
University of Siena <https://www.dfclam.unisi.it/en>, H2IOSC
<https://www.h2iosc.cnr.it/> project and CNR-ILC
<https://www.ilc.cnr.it/en/>.
*Dr. Julia Swan*
/San José State University, USA/
*/Accent Bias Experienced by Instructors at Minority-Serving
Institutions of Higher Education
/*
đź“… *December 15, 2025*
🕓 *4:30 PM – 5:30 PM (CEST)*
*Venue*: Online
*Attendees*: Researchers, secondary school teachers, language instructors
*Summary: *Accent bias and linguistic discrimination shape outcomes in
housing, the legal system, hiring, and higher education, where students’
perceptions of instructor accents strongly influence teaching
evaluations and disproportionately disadvantage faculty with non-native
or non-standard accents. This study examines faculty at three
minority-serving Bay Area universities, comparing native English
speakers, early bilinguals, and non-native speakers through survey data
on belonging and linguistic bias. While non-native and early bilingual
faculty reported similar levels of collegial support as native speakers,
non-native speakers felt significantly more self-conscious about their
accents, perceived their accents as hindering professional potential,
and were less likely to see their accents as advantageous. Both
non-native speakers and early bilinguals believed their accents
negatively influenced evaluations from students and peers, and early
bilinguals anticipated that newcomers with similar accents would
struggle to adjust. These findings highlight the need for accent-bias
training in faculty recruitment, evaluation, and promotion to enhance
faculty diversity and reduce educational inequities.
*Bio: *Julia Swan is a sociolinguist interested in topics related to
language and social identity. She has made broad contributions to
American dialectology and sound change in the Western U.S. Her current
projects investigate the role of multilingual speakers, often immigrants
and their children, as leaders of sound change in the emergence of
regional dialects. In other collaborations, she has explored cognitive
aspects of processing "accented" speech, the role of perception in sound
change, and individuals' experiences of accent bias.
Register at the seminar registration page:
https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/74ced700-e24e-4dcf-8dc4-aca98b51f1b0@34c64e9f-d27f-4edd-a1f0-1397f0c84f94
Make sure to have the Teams platform installed.
The recording of the last CIRCE seminar by Samantha Jackson is now
available on theH2IOSC Training Environment
<https://h2iosc-training-platform.ilc4clarin.ilc.cnr.it/en/login>. Once
logged in with your credentials, choose the course “Language and Accent
Discrimination - Online Seminar Series” and activate it with the code
PbK837GtE. For any inquiry, write to [email protected].
All the best,
Claudia Soria
CIRCE Project
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