Intelligibility, accentedness and emotional attitudes in English as a lingua

No language has ever diversified as much as English has over the past 50 years. The driving force of this change is a shift in the sociolinguistic identity of its users. If one considers that English is predominately used now by ‘Non-Native Speakers’ (NNSs) to communicate with other NNS speech communities, a very different picture of the English language begins to immerge. This image has catalysed a paradigm shift away from theory cloaked in NS ideologies and questioned fundamental aspects of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Framed by a theory of foreign speech adaptation, this paper looks at three factors that may contribute to the misunderstandings that occur in the English as Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions of an Australian tertiary setting. The three independent variables are intelligibility, accentedness, and the emotional attitudes one has towards language variation. The preliminary findings suggest that listeners with a shared first language (SFL) background or typologically similar first language (TSFL) background to a speaker do not experience improved intelligibility. Similarly, participants with a SFL or TSFL background do not give lower ratings of accentedness. Furthermore, ratings of accent strength were found to be strongly correlated with intelligibility scores. Lastly, ELF users tend to classify emotional attitudes towards language variation into discrete categories, and that these attitudes are influenced more so by the perceived identity of the speaker rather than their speech quality. In sum, we have only begun to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the nature of ELF interactions.

English as an international language and teachers' professional identity

This thesis found that the notion of English as a lingua franca and its implications in teaching English are difficult for English teachers to accept in a social-cultural context where English is a foreign language. Teachers' professional identity is the key to determine the success or failure of educational innovations.

Imagining future selves

This thesis reports how a vision of an ideal self as a speaker of English in the imagined global community where English is being used as lingua franca (ELF) by a vastly growing number of non-native English speakers (NNESs) for a wider communication alongside their L1, positively influences Taiwanese students' engagement in learning English in an exam-dominant context.

Defending friends : Robert Codrington, George Sarawia and Edward Wogale

Friendship between nineteenth century missionary anthropologists and their converted cultural mentors was central to the gathering of cultural and linguistic information. This chapter traces the friendship between Anglican missionary/anthropologist, Robert Codrington, and brothers George Sarawia - first Melanesian priest - and Edward Wogale - deacon. Codrington's theological perspective on Melanesians and his close friendships with the pupils of the Melanesian Mission School at Norfolk Island allowed him to resist the increasing racialism of Atlantic science in the late nineteenth century and to challenge the evolutionist anthropology of the 1870s and 1880s. The chapter is based, in part, on a cache of letters from Wogale and Sarawia to Codrington written in Mota, the lingua franca of the Anglican Mission.

The structure of academic prose : intercultural and interdisciplinry dimensions

In the contemporary world of increasing internationalisation of scholarship the ability to communicate in the “lingua franca” of global research communities and familiarity with relevant academic genres is crucial to attaining research visibility in the academy. Native English language competency does not guarantee the possession of knowledge and skills about how to manipulate the language structure of academic genres to produce the kind of scholarly prose acceptable in the community of readers. This task is even more challenging to Non-NESB academic writers, mainly because the purpose of academic writing is both informative and rhetorical, and the information packaging strategies are likely to be discipline and culture bound.
Communication in professional academic culture is carried out and codified by selected genre categories which function as the media for scholarly discussions. This presentation focuses on the structure of a research paper, the most widely established form of presenting academic research. With an increasing internationalisation of scholarship, the schema of a research paper faces two potentially conflicting sets of forces. At one end are the forces of established conventions of the rhetorical pattern of research papers which are modelled on the structure of an “Anglo” research paper. On the other are the forces of norms for text construction of the author’s culture of socialization.

I discuss analytical approaches to the examination of the relational organisation of this genre exploring both intercultural and interdisciplinary dimensions. I examine paratactic and hypotactic configurations of the structure of research paper, providing examples of relational strategies utilised by native and no-native English speaker writers representing Anglo and non-Anglo discourse communities.

Intelligibility and accentedness in conversations amongst international students in Australia

Despite the prevalence of English conversations being held by Non Native Speakers (NNS), little research has investigated accent, the most salient aspect of pronunciation, in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions. The aim of this study is to investigate two facets of accentedness: the intelligibility of accented speech for Non-Native Listeners (NNL) and the impact that language attitude has on the judgment of accentedness. While accentedness has been shown to be both independent of intelligibility and extremely salient to Native Listeners (NL) (Derwing 2008; Nelson, 2008), there is a significant gap in our understanding of how accented English speech is judged by NNL (Derwing & Munro 1997; 2009; Munro & Derwing 1995; 1999; 2010; Munro 2007). It is hypothesised that there is a dependency between the intelligibility scores of foreign accented speech and accentedness judgment in ELF contexts. Moreover, it is believed that the judgment of accentedness is influenced by attitudes held by the NNL. The intelligibility of accented speech will be investigated by measuring the accuracy of transcribed audio samples. Judgment of accentedness will be measured using a Likert scale and journal entries. Attitudes towards accentedness will, firstly, be quantified using a survey that rates language attitudes on a Likert scale, followed by a semi-structured interview that will elicit attitudes towards accentedness. The results of this study will have implications for the teaching and learning of pronunciation, listening skills, and curriculum design. Furthermore, the findings may allude to fundamental differences in how NNL and Native Listeners (NL) perceive second language (L2) speech; thus, such inferences may lead to a shift in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) perspectives.

Challenges for developing EAP practice in anglophone contexts

English for academic purposes (EAP), the academically-focused branch of English for specific purposes (Johns & Dudley-Evans, 1991), aims to facilitate learners’ participation in the English language academic community (Hyland & Hamp-Lyons,2002; Prosser, 1994). The EAP sector has expanded rapidly in recent years (Liyanage & Walker, 2014b) and now plays a significant role within Anglophone and non-Anglophone higher education contexts (Ashraf, Hakim, & Zulfiqar, 2014; Basturkmen, 2012; Kafle, 2014). Global trends which associate English and the West with educational prestige (Kubota & Lehner, 2004), assigning them a “perceived superiority” (Liyanage & Walker, 2014b, p. 165) over other languages and educational paradigms, have led considerable numbers of students to undertake English-medium higher education (Brown, 2014; Doiz, Lasagabaster, & Sierra, 2013; Kim, Tatar, & Choi, 2014). These developments have cemented the international status of the language, which has also has become the global medium for academic communication and a lingua franca in general (Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002; Jenkins, 2011; Seidlhofer, 2005). Increased student mobility and preferences for English-medium education have been of particular economic significance to Britain, Australasia and North America, referred to as the BANA nations, which have experienced a boost in overseas enrolments (Andrade, 2006; Saw, Abbott, Donaghey, & McDonald, 2013; Terraschke & Wahid, 2011). Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom are amongst the countries with the highest proportion of international tertiary enrolments globally (OECD, 2014), and the United States and Canada also host a significant number of overseas students (Choudaha & Chang, 2012; Siddiq, Nethercote, Lye, & Baroni, 2012).