Pre-service Teachers' Attitudes Toward Hawaii Creole English

Abstract

This study investigates pre-service public school teachers' attitudes concerning Hawaii Creole English (HCE), a variety of English commonly spoken by many of Hawaii's public school students. The study also explores how attitudes might differ depending on teachers' language background and whether there are differences in ratings of competence and solidarity traits. Thirty-six teachers, including 24 HCE speakers and 12 non-HCE speakers, rated five speech samples representing the following varieties of English: HCE, standard English (SE), and foreign-accented English (a distracter). A 7-point semantic differential scale was used by all raters. Raters were asked to give their first impressions of the students speaking. Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance indicated that teachers rated the SE samples significantly higher than the HCE samples. ln addition, univariate analyses of variance revealed that the non-HCE-speaking teachers rated HCE lower than did the HCE-speaking teachers. However, this second finding should be cautiously interpreted since the multivariate analysis did not show statistically significant differences. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance indicated that teachers rated HCE higher in solidarity than competence, while the opposite was the case for their ratings of SE. It is suggested that an ethnographic study be done to get a more holistic picture of pre-service teachers' attitudes toward HCE.