Assessing The English Speaking Proficiency Of Limited English Speaking Foreign Defendants In Chinese Courts

Court interpreters providing interpreting services in trials involving foreign defendantsoften complain that most foreign defendants’ English speaking proficiency is, more oftenthan not, far from adequate to stand trial and being intelligible to interpreters. Courtinterpreters often encounter confusions or difficulties in trying to understand the Englishuttered by foreign defendants, most of whom come from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Cameroon orother African countries where English is the official language due to colonization by theUK during the17th,18thand19thcenturies. Most of these defendants can communicate inEnglish with each other to some extent, but due to the fact that most of them did notreceive much formal schooling, their English language proficiency is often problematicand their spoken English is dyed with all kinds of heavy accents. Irrespective of theinterpreters’ interpreting skills and listening skills, the heavily accented English of theAfrican defendants severely influences the efficiency and quality of court interpreting.Against this background, this study is to explore into the unintelligible English speakingproficiency of these limited English speaking foreign defendants and to shed light onformulating a mechanism for assessing the English speaking proficiency of the foreigndefendants.By taking into consideration of the factors influencing the intelligibility of Englishas a second language (hereinafter referred to as L2) and consequently the quality of courtinterpreting, a theoretical framework for the assessment of English speaking proficiencyis constructed, which includes pronunciation, semantics, vocabulary, fluency andpragmatics. To guarantee the consistency of analysis of the data collected, the analyticalframeworks are proposed.Given the theoretical framework of this study, an investigation is carried out touncover the influences of the foreign defendants’(in)sufficient English speakingproficiency upon the quality and efficiency of court interpreting. The results of theinvestigation underlie the urgent necessity for assessing the English speaking proficiency of the foreign defendants. The following procedures are employed to deal with the abovesubject: first, the English pronunciation of the African foreign defendants identified in thedata, consisting of accent and stress, is analyzed by application of auditory phonetics andexperimental methods. Then, their semantic and pragmatic competence is evaluatedthrough discourse analysis of their production of English speeches. According to thefindings obtained from the data analyses, some of these foreign defendants have limitedor insufficient English speaking proficiency for standing trial.This study has produced some guidelines for establishing a systematic and reliableassessment mechanism for the English speaking proficiency of foreign defendants so asto determine whether their English level is sufficient for trial. Furthermore, certainimplications and suggestions are advanced at the end of the study which mainly involve:a professional third-party test center should be assigned to conduct a systemic andreliable assessment for the English speaking proficiency of foreign criminals beforebringing them into legal processes including interrogation and court trial, with the hopeof guaranteeing their language rights in accordance with the law.