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Takes Two to Tango: Research into Accent, Comprehensibility and Intelligibility and the Implications for CLIL

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Book cover Language Learning, Discourse and Communication

Part of the book series: Second Language Learning and Teaching ((SLLT))

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Abstract

Varieties of English abound and students need to understand them, but research is still attempting to determine which features make a given accent easier or more difficult to understand. To that end, the constructs of accent, comprehensibility and intelligibility have been the subject of research in relation to, among others: fluency (Derwing et al. 2009; Cucchiarini 2000; Kormos and Dénes 2004); assessment of listening and speaking (Major et al. 2002; Tauroza and Luk 1997); and prosodic features’ influence on speech segmentation (Cutler in Cognitive models of speech processing: psycholinguistic and computational perspectives. MIT, Cambridge, 1990). Studies with immigrant populations in the North American context of English as a Second Language (e.g. Munro and Derwing 1995; Derwing and Munro 2001, TESOL 2005) show that researchers are trying to operationalize these three concepts, in order to help instructors better define their learners’ needs within such settings. This chapter argues that the body of research into these three concepts, including experimental and descriptive studies, holds crucial insights for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Similarly to bilingual education, CLIL is becoming more widespread in Europe under the impulse of the Bologna process. The corresponding increase in the number of non-native speakers of English teaching field-specific content in English highlights the importance of the interplay between the principles and goals of CLIL and three constructs: accent, comprehensibility and intelligibility. This chapter explores the main findings of studies into these three constructs in order to address one of the main challenges of CLIL: communicating field-specific content via effective, comprehensible language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jun/19/elt-diary-june-technology-innovation.

  2. 2.

    See Costa and Coleman (2010).

  3. 3.

    European Commission (EC) Web site: http://ec.europa.eu/languages/language-teaching/content-and-language-integrated-learning_en.htm.

  4. 4.

    See also Wolff (2003) about constructivist principles underlying CLIL.

  5. 5.

    EC Web site, as above.

  6. 6.

    See Apsel (2012) about the urgency to learn from the experience of learners who drop out of CLIL, referring particularly to the German context.

  7. 7.

    Query Occurrences from URLs or book titles were eliminated from results. This was not a proper keyword search of a corpus, because the terms were selected by me rather than generated by the data; other terms with higher frequency rates may thus have been missed.

  8. 8.

    It also holds in the larger job market: “Employers within the teaching market seem to promote the very concept of nativeness as a commercial and competitive argument for excellence. As a result it is more difficult for non-native teachers of English to be employed within the English teaching business of EFL and ESL than for native teachers.” (Derivry-Plard 2008: 284).

  9. 9.

    Obviously, as Derwing and Munro make clear, "Having an accent is not a sign of overall low proficiency" (2009: 478). However, being perceived as less proficient would tend to impact negatively on one's image.

  10. 10.

    Grammar and vocabulary combined constituted the other main criterion which determined native speaker teachers’ greater perceived linguistic competence.

  11. 11.

    See Smith et al. (1992) or Jia and Bergerson (2008) for more details.

  12. 12.

    See http://esl.ehe.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/StateLaw.pdf.

  13. 13.

    Familiarity with a particular accent, speaker and topic also helped, as expected.

  14. 14.

    It is not a new concept; Munro and Derwing trace the distinction between accuracy and intelligibility back to 1900, when Sweet (1900) argued that “sufficient accuracy of pronunciation to insure intelligibility” should be the goal of language learners (1900: 152, cited in Munro and Derwing 2011: 319).

  15. 15.

    See similar suggestions in Fraser (2011).

  16. 16.

    http://micase.elicorpora.info/.

  17. 17.

    http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/base_corpus/.

  18. 18.

    Another solution is to use un-connotate terms. For example, instead of the terms L1/native and L2/non-native, Fraser (2011) uses English-speaking background (ESB) and non-English-speaking background (NESB) to describe participants in a case study in Australia.

  19. 19.

    http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/clil-teacher-magazine/news-and-events/clil-events/. See also the AsianEFL Journal’s call for papers for the September 2013 conference “CLIL in Asian Contexts: Emerging Trends”, at http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/special-editions.php.

  20. 20.

    For example, see the 1,790,000 hits for “accent reduction” on Google Search in June 2012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Savoie, Chambéry, France

    Alice Henderson

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  1. Alice Henderson
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Correspondence to Alice Henderson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Insitute of English, University of Łodz, Łódź, Lódzkie, Poland

    Weronika Szubko-Sitarek

  2. Insitute of English, University of Łodz, Łódź, Lódzkie, Poland

    Łukasz Salski

  3. Insitute of English, University of Łodz, Łódź, Lódzkie, Poland

    Piotr Stalmaszczyk

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Henderson, A. (2014). Takes Two to Tango: Research into Accent, Comprehensibility and Intelligibility and the Implications for CLIL. In: Szubko-Sitarek, W., Salski, Ł., Stalmaszczyk, P. (eds) Language Learning, Discourse and Communication. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00419-8_5

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