Abstract
This study investigated the intelligibility of Chinese graduate students to their
Indian, Chinese, Korean, and American peers. Specifically, the researcher sought to determine the teaching priorities for English for Academic Purposes in the US, where listeners have a wide variety of native languages.
Research on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), International Teaching Assistants, and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has not provided sufficient empirical data on the factors that affect intelligible English communication among academic professionals with many native languages (L1). SLA has focused on the processes and factors affecting the acquisition of second language (L2) phonology; and ITA research has focused on the communication needs of international graduate students teaching American undergraduates. Both perspectives examine the intelligibility of foreign- accented speech to native English-speaking listeners. World Englishes (WE) and ELF argue for more research from the perspective of L2 listeners, which thus far has largely been limited to linguistic descriptions and case studies.
A psycholinguistic word-recognition-in-noise study was designed to examine to what extent a talker’s L1 and segmental pronunciation accuracy affected intelligibility, and how this varied by a listener’s L1 and word familiarity. Participants included 6 male graduate students (Chinese & American) as talkers and 72 graduate students (Indian,