| In the context of economic globalization and English globalization,English plays a pivotal role as an international language or a lingua franca.In different countries and regions,English has taken up many features from their native languages and cultures,resulting in the “indigenization” of English and various English varieties have sprang out.Inevitably,in the process of intercultural interacting in English,some misunderstandings would occur among different communities.Thus,intelligibility is very crucial for successful intercultural communication.An increasing number of researchers have done research on the intelligibility of different English varieties.However,the evaluation criterion were all decided by English native speakers,such as Americans or British.This was still caught in the traditional preconception that native English speakers was the only criteria of judging the intelligibility.Moreover,the study of Southeast Asian English varieties was inadequate.This overlooked the emerging role of Southeast Asian English as a regional lingua franca and its important functions.Based on the research gaps,this study aimed to explore Chinese university students’ comprehensibility of Southeast Asian students’ English.Based on the above mentioned background,this study aimed to explore: 1)Chinese students’ overall intelligibility level of Southeast Asian international students’ English;2)the segmentals detrimental to Chinese university students’ intelligibility of Southeast Asian international students’ English;3)the suprasegmentals detrimental to Chinese university students’ intelligibility of Southeast Asian international students’ English.This study chose 40 international graduate students from four Southeast Asian countries(Laos,Thailand,Burma & Vietnam)as speakers and 40 Chinese sophomores and juniors in one university as listeners.The assessment of intelligibility was based on the recordings provided by the speakers and the listeners’ perception of them.To gauge the intelligibility,the listeners were asked to do three dictation tasks(43 words,a story & an impromptu speech).To answer the research questions,a quantitative method SPSS 17.0,an exact-word method and a qualitative analysismethod were employed to collect and analyze data.The results obtained from the study showed that: 1)The Chinese students’ overall intelligibility level of Southeast Asian Englishes was strikingly low and more than half of the listening materials were unintelligible to them.The major reasons that affected intelligibility were the context,the access of the listening materials.Among the four Southeast Asian English varieties,there existed no significant difference,the reason might be that a lot of pronunciation features were shared by these English varieties;2)In the category of vowel phonemes,the factors hampering intelligibility were the vowel length,e.g.,the confusion of /i:/ and /?/;vowel quality,e.g.,the confusion of /e/ and /ai/,/?/ and /e/;and the simplification of diphthongs,e.g.,/e?/ was shortened to /e/.In the category of consonant phonemes,the affecting factors were certain phonemes’ confusion,e.g.,the confusion of /p/ and /b/,/v/ and /w/;addition,e.g.,the addition of /n/ at the end of end of the word;deletion,e.g.,the deletion of /n/,/t/,/d/,and /s/;3)At the suprasegmental level,the flat intonation,misplaced stress and long pause between sentences contributed to the low intelligibility.This study does have some pedagogical implications.The concept of English as a Lingua Franca can be further strengthened.In classrooms,English teachers are encouraged to introduce different English varieties to students to overcome the low intelligibility.The students’ familiarity of certain English varieties will be strengthened.In addition,the recordings of SEA Englishes can be used as small corpus for future research.However,there existed some limitations in this study,in future studies a larger sample and other marginalized English varieties can be considered. |
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