Investigating the role of listeners' L1 on the intelligibility of EIL speech

Abstract

[eng] English has become a lingua franca which is increasingly used worldwide. Therefore, a reference to English as an International Language (EIL) is commonplace nowadays. Consequently, it is important to take into account that some differences and maybe even some changes in the standard pronunciations will be made at some point in the future, if we consider that it is important to assure international intelligibility. This project investigates whether the English spoken by Majorcan students of English, both CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and non-CLIL students, is intelligible internationally. It does not only analyse the phonemes which have caused intelligibility problems, but also those which are different from the English phonemic repertoire and have not caused any problems at all. The data used in this project consisted of four different recordings of Majorcan students reading the same text aloud. These recordings were then transcribed orthographically by four French and four German listeners. After counting the results obtained, number of perfectly transcribed words, number of well understood –ed and –es endings, the results were analysed statistically by means of one way ANOVAS. All in all, the results showed that there were no significant differences among the French and German listeners, except for the intelligibility of the words with an –s ending.