Although linguistic diversity is common in university classrooms, the
language background of students and teachers is often not considered when
designing instructional materials. Prior work has suggested that students
learn better from slides with less text, but these studies have only been
conducted with instructors who speak English with a North American accent
(Mayer, 2017). The present study aims to explore whether more text on
slides is beneficial to student learning when the lecture is taught by an
instructor with an unfamiliar accent. To test this, American,
English-speaking undergraduate students watched two lectures – one
containing slides with minimal text and the other with slides containing
lots of text – spoken either by an American-accented speaker or a
Mandarin-accented speaker. After the lectures, participants were tested on
the material. In line with prior research suggesting that text can
facilitate accent adaptation (Janse & Adank, 2012), we expect that when the
instructor speaks with a non-native accent, more text on slides will be
beneficial. This work sheds light on ways to maximize student learning from
instructors who speak with a variety of accents.