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Within the field of sociolinguistics, dialect variation and speech perception of English varieties have been largely studied (Giles and Powesland 1975; Labov 1972; Preston 1996), and the expected results have been empirically proved. Nevertheless, the perceptions that Spanish students of English might have concerning English variation, has received less attention. The present paper uses a series of recordings belonging to different accents of British English; a group of Spanish students are exposed to these recordings and required to fill in a questionnaire which will reflect their impressions about the varieties. The results from this study will show that students of English as a Foreign Language have been traditionally exposed almost exclusively to Standard varieties only, and that their perception of other varieties may not coincide with that of the native speakers of English; in fact, it can be very different. Moreover, the findings to be obtained in this work could have implications on the teaching of EFL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]