Listening to estuary English in Singapore

In Singapore, many people are not familiar with Estuary English (EE), the variety of English becoming popular in much of southern England. In the current study, when students listened to interviews with EE speakers and were asked to transcribe orthographically what they heard, most of them had severe problems. Features of pronunciation that contributed to the difficulties included th-fronting, t-glottalling, and fronting of close back vowels, and in many cases even the context of the conversation did not help to resolve the confusion, for example, when three was pronounced with an initial [f]. This article suggests that some exposure to nonstandard accents such as EE would be valuable for students of English because they arc quite likely to encounter EE speakers.