An Empirical Study on the Intelligibility of English Spoken by Chinese University Students
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Lingli Zhang
Abstract
This paper reports an empirical study on the intelligibility of English spoken by Chinese University students, aiming to identify the factors that hamper intelligibility and suggest the pedagogical priorities in pronunciation teaching. The participants were 45 university sophomores, whose recorded data were transcribed and evaluated correspondingly by 45 educated listeners from 22 different countries. The results reveal that although the speakers’ English may have strong accents, it is intelligible to international listeners to a great extent. Phonological problems that hamper intelligibility are vowel length and quality, simplification of diphthongs, voiced and voiceless plosives, dental fricative, word ending nasals, consonant clusters as well as stress, rhythm and intonation.
©2015 Walter de Gruyter, Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- An ERP Study in English Relative Clause Processing by Chinese-English Bilinguals
- An Empirical Study on the Intelligibility of English Spoken by Chinese University Students
- A Review of Empirical Studies in L2 Dynamic Assessment
- A Review of Empirical Studies in L2 Dynamic Assessment
- The Pragmatics of Pronoun Choice in China English: Corpus Evidence from Advanced English Students’ Oral Proficiency Exam
- A Study on Chinese Students’ Perceptual Learning Styles, Ideal L2 Self, and L2 Motivated L2 Behavior
- The Relationship Between Voice Development and the Quality of EFL Writing: A Study on First-Person Pronouns in the Revision Process
- Chinese Abstracts
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- An ERP Study in English Relative Clause Processing by Chinese-English Bilinguals
- An Empirical Study on the Intelligibility of English Spoken by Chinese University Students
- A Review of Empirical Studies in L2 Dynamic Assessment
- A Review of Empirical Studies in L2 Dynamic Assessment
- The Pragmatics of Pronoun Choice in China English: Corpus Evidence from Advanced English Students’ Oral Proficiency Exam
- A Study on Chinese Students’ Perceptual Learning Styles, Ideal L2 Self, and L2 Motivated L2 Behavior
- The Relationship Between Voice Development and the Quality of EFL Writing: A Study on First-Person Pronouns in the Revision Process
- Chinese Abstracts
