The Intelligibility, Comprehensibility and Accentedness of Asian English Speakers in English Listening Materials

Abstract

This study investigated the intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of Asian English speakers’ speech used as listening materials for an English Listening-Speaking course for healthcare students. Two groups of listeners were 15 experienced language users and 15 second-year students majoring in Occupational Health & Safety at a university in Thailand. Thirty-six speech samples spoken by 7 Asian English speakers from five L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Myanmar, Filipino and Emirian) and 5 native English speakers (American, British and Australian) were used for an orthographic transcription task and comprehensibility and accent ratings. The participants were asked to indicate the extent to which the speech samples were comprehensible, and rate the degree to which they are difficult or easy to understand, including the strength of accents. The findings revealed that the native and Asian accented speech were comprehensible listening input. Most participants perceived Asian English accents as easy to understand to moderately difficult to understand. Some particular accents are perceived as strong; however, they did not necessarily cause low intelligibility. Interestingly, native speakers are not always found to be the highly intelligible speakers. Implications for incorporating Asian English accents in listening materials for English listening-speaking courses are also discussed.