International Intelligibility Of Chinese-accented English

English has become an international language or lingua franca, which is no longer owned just by its native speakers (Graddol,2006), and its non-native speakers outnumbered its native speakers. As one of the central concepts in world Englishes, intelligibility is of paramount importance in intercultural communication. The concept of intelligibility was first put forward by Cartford in1950, who distinguished intelligibility from the effectiveness of an utterance. Smith and Nelson (1985) defined intelligibility as the understanding of the speakers’intention, and divided it into three layers, namely, intelligibility, comprehensibility and interpretability. In their view, intelligibility was defined as word and utterance recognition; comprehensibility as utterance meaning and interpretability as the perception and understanding of the speakers’intentions (Nelson1995). Smith (1992) viewed these categories as degrees of understanding on a continuum. In the current study, Intelligibility was operationalized into the categories of intelligibility and comprehensibility.Many scholars have conducted research on the intelligibility of different varieties of English, such as American English, Indian English, Japanese English, Nigerian English, South-east English and Singapore English and so on; however, the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English is a less studied area, except for some findings on the intelligibility of Hong Kong English (Kirkpatrick, Deterding&Wong,2008). Domestic Chinese-accented English study focused on the negative transfer by Chinese. Moreover, the relevant studies were sporadic since their focuses were only on specific dialect transfer instead of the systematic study on common features of Chinese-accented English. In terms of research methodology, few empirical studies were seen in literature. Furthermore, the research subjects were English major students or middle school students instead of non-English major students, who constituted the majority of the university students. The current research aims to identify the features that hamper international intelligibility of Chinese-accented English, and suggest priorities for English pronunciation teaching in the context of China. The three research questions are as follows:1. What are the general level and characteristics of international intelligibility of the speech by Chinese university students?2. What are the features that hamper international intelligibility of Chinese-accented English?3. What are the features that hamper international intelligibility of speech by university students of different dialects respectively?The speakers were32university sophomores (16females and16males), majoring in17different specialties. They came from7typical Chinese dialects, namely Cantonese, Min dialect, Hokkin, Xiang dialect, Gan dialect, Wu dialect, Northern dialect. They carried out a diagnostic pronunciation test which consisted of44words (containing44English phonemes), a passage North Wind and the Sun, and an impromptu speech An Unforgettable Experience. The recorded data were transcribed correspondingly by32(16male and16female) educated listeners from19different nationalities. Among them,11came from inner circle countries, namely, America, UK, Canada and New Zealand;11from outer circle countries, namely Sudan, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Dominica, Pakistan, Nigeria, India and Malaysia;10from expanding circle countries, namely, Germany, Japan, Thailand, Turkey, Mexico, and Vietnam. The mismatches between the speakers’transcriptions and the listeners’transcriptions were regarded as intelligibility failures. And all the possible causes for the intelligibility failures were ranked according to the frequencies of mismatches in the transcriptions. Furthermore, the international listeners were also required to rate the speakers’speech in terms of intelligibility from1to9(9means the most intelligible and1means the least intelligible), use three adjectives to describe Chinese-accented English and write a comment (200 words) about the pronunciation problems of Chinese speakers.The main findings of the research are summarized as follows:1. The average score of intelligibility of the32speakers are5.6(the total score is9). The international listeners agree that although they had some difficulty in understanding the speech, they managed to get the speakers’intended meaning. The most salient adjectives are unintelligible, accented, hesitant, fast and so on.2. The results reveal that the salient features that hamper international intelligibility of Chinese-accented English are (1)vowel quantity, especially the conflation of/i:/and/I/,/o:/and/o/;(2)vowel quality, the conflation of/e,ae/,/∧,ae/,/∧,a://∧,o/;(3)the substitution of diphthongs with monophthongs, the conflation of/ei/with/e, ae, i:/, the conflation of/ai/with/ae/,/au/with/o:,o/;(4)fortis and lenis consonants confusion,/i/and/n/confusion,/v/and/w/confusion, the/n/and/m/confusion at word ending,/i/and/r/,/θ,(?)/with/s,z,t,d/,/r/and/w/,/t(?)//d3/and/tr//dr/,/I/and/u://i(?)/;(5)The epenthesis, elision and confusion of the word ending consonants;(6)The epenthesis, elision of consonant clusters. Besides the above-mentioned, the random pauses, flat intonation, fast speed and grammatical mistakes in the connected speech are also the main causes that hamper the international intelligibility.3. Besides some common phonemes that hamper the international intelligibility of speech by Chinese university students, there also exist some dialect-specific problems. The change scene of English appeals for a paradigm shift in English languageteaching. Undoubtedly, intelligibility is an important aspect to promote pronunciationteaching reform in China. First of all, college English pronunciation teachers shouldbear multiple standards and international intelligibility in mind, cultivate students’ "Global Englishes" awareness and enhance their confidence in Chinese-accented English. Secondly, they should familiarize themselves with all the general, dialectal and individual problems that hamper the international intelligibility of speech by Chinese university students. As the teaching priorities, the general and core area to the intelligibility should be highlighted in the classroom teaching, while the specific and non core area could be tackled in the process of web-based autonomous language learning. Finally, it is highly recommended that the index of intelligibility be supplemented in the college English oral test evaluation.