Results and Discussion
Three papers were drawn upon and discussed in this chapter to answer the three research questions. They are Measuring the comprehensibility of Englishes within ASEAN among Aseans (Wilang & Teo, 2012b), Enhancing comprehensibility among ELF users (Wilang & Teo, 2012c), and Exploring the relationship between intelligibility and education, (Wilang & Teo, 2012d).
Comprehensibility of the Outer Circle Englishes
The first question addressed in this study was “Are the Englishes in the Outer Circle comprehensible to the citizens of the Expanding Circle nations? The findings for the above question were detailed in the paper titled “Measuring the Comprehensibility of Englishes within ASEAN among Aseans” (Wilang & Teo, 2012b). The major contribution of the results of this study described in this paper towards intelligibility research within ASEAN is specifically the quantitative findings, which is the level of moderate comprehensibility attained by the Expanding Circle‟s citizens toward the Outer Circle‟s spoken English varieties.
Previous research on intelligibility and/or comprehensibility has not set an absolute statistical formula to measure the understanding of word utterances between and among non-native speakers of English. Thus, the basis of statistical formula used for the treatment of the gathered data follows the standard calculation of range, the difference between the highest and lowest values.
Table 2 Comprehensibility of outer circle speakers‟ utterances