L2 listener attitudes towards speaker intelligibility, comprehensibility, and teaching quality

Thesis

Intelligibility and the associated concepts of comprehensibility and accentedness are not objective features of speech, but are at least partially constructed by listener factors. Studies using a matched-guise technique, where listeners are led to believe that they are listening to two different speakers of different ethnicities, while they actually listen to the same native speaker, have found that listeners who believe a speaker to be non-Caucasian may judge them to sound less like a native speaker, to be a poorer quality teacher, and to be less intelligible. While the effects of native listener biases against non-native speakers and marginalised ethnicities have been well explored, fewer studies have focused on non-native listeners, especially in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. This study therefore aimed to determine whether the speech and teaching evaluations of English learners in Korea were affected by biases regarding the speaker’s ethnicity. 74 Korean L1 university students listened to a speech sample by the same native English speaker. Photographs displayed while listening implied to the listeners that the speaker was either Asian or Caucasian. Listeners rated the speaker on various measures, including personal attributes, comprehensibility, accentedness, and teaching quality, and completed tasks to measure comprehension and intelligibility. It was found that listeners who saw an Asian face were more likely to rate the speaker as having a less native-like accent, and found him less intelligible than listeners who saw a Caucasian face. However, no differences were found in listeners’ attitudes towards the speaker’s personal qualities or teaching ability. Listeners’ knowledge of L2s other than English and their exposure to English speakers were not found to mediate the effects of speaker ethnicity on ratings or listening performance.

Authors: Payne-Wheeler, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-g2jydebdj
• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Native English speaking teachers; L2 attitudes; English as a foreign language; Comprehensibility; Intelligibility; Listening; Non-native English speaking teachers; Reverse linguistic stereotyping; Accentedness
• Subjects: Applied linguistics