Research methods and intelligibility studies

Abstract

This paper first briefly reviews the concept of intelligibility as it has been employed in both English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and world Englishes (WE) research. It then examines the findings of the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a list of phonological features that empirical research has shown to be important for safeguarding mutual intelligibility between non-native speakers of English. The main point of the paper is to analyse these findings and demonstrate that many of them can be explained if three perspectives (linguistic, psycholinguistic and historical-variationist) are taken. This demonstration aims to increase the explanatory power of the concept of intelligibility by providing some theoretical background. An implication for ELF research is that at the phonological level, internationally intelligible speakers have a large number of features in common, regardless of whether they are non-native speakers or native speakers. An implication for WE research is that taking a variety-based, rather than a features-based, view of phonological variation and its connection with intelligibility is likely to be unhelpful, as intelligibility depends to some extent on the phonological features of individual speakers, rather than on the varieties per se

Contextualising a pedagogical model for English‐language education in Hong Kong

“…Notwithstanding this apparently sound approach to identifying core features of HKE for pedagogical foci, the application of the ELF empirical findings seems to be based on the assumption that Hong Kong is a typical ELF-using context, where L2 English speakers of different mother tongues and cultures (rather than L1 English speakers) are the majority. In other words, if the codification process centres on the issue of intelligibility, further studies should be conducted to evaluate the intelligibility of the Hong Kong phonological features with respect to a wider range of audience (both L1 and L2 speakers) ) and the adoption of multiple research methods (Rajadurai 2007;Munro and Derwing 2011) in addition to the nature of intelligibility being interactional (Sewell 2010), because, according to our research findings, the issue of mutual understanding has been extended to interactions involving English speakers across all the three circles. In this respect, future investigations should perhaps also take account of the intelligibility-comprehensibilityinterpretability scheme (also known as the Smith paradigm), which, Nelson (2008: 307) argues, have been 'a good, solid frame on which to hang our investigations and analyses of Englishes as they are spoken' (see also Nelson 2011).…”

Intelligibility of Select World Englishes and the Factors Affecting It: The Case of High School ESL Learners

“…Nonetheless, this paper utilizes the definition of Smith and Nelson (1985) as the mechanism to identify the intelligibility level of World Englishes. This definition is perhaps one of the most applied definitions of intelligibility as several researchers (Deterding & Kirkpatrick, 2006;Sewell, 2010;and Nazari, 2014) also utilize their definition.…”

Functional Load and the Teaching-Learning Relationship in L2 Pronunciation

“…The studies of Munro and Derwing (2006) and Suzukida and Saito (2019) were both concerned with the dimensions of comprehensibility (i.e., perceived ease of understanding) and accentedness. I have elsewhere proposed that FL can also help to explain the findings of certain studies focusing on intelligibility (i.e., actual understanding in terms of word recognition; see Sewell, 2010;Sewell, 2017). The studies of Jenkins (2000) and Deterding (2013) were both concerned with international intelligibility among non-native speakers of English, and involved collecting corpora of misunderstandings.…”