Foreign accentedness of English sentences spoken by Japanese EFL learners and Japanese teachers of English: A first report

Abstract

This study reports the results of a foreign-accented-rating experiment that investigate the foreign accentedness of spoken English sentences by two Japanese groups, Japanese EFL learners and Japanese teachers of English. This study aims first to investigate whether spoken English sentences by Japanese teachers of English are judged less foreign-accented than those by Japanese EFL learners, and second to investigate whether American-English listeners rate spoken English sentences by Japanese speakers more severely than Japanese listeners do. The stimuli were five sentences adopted from Flege, Munro, and McKay (1995) spoken by 33 Japanese EFL learners and 33 Japanese teachers of English. Ten American-English speakers and ten Japanese speakers were asked to rate the stimuli presented visually and auditorily by clicking along a line on the computer screen for their ratings. The participants’ original responses were converted to 10 scales and were submitted to the analyses. The results showed that spoken English sentences by Japanese teachers of English were rated significantly less Japanese-accented than those by Japanese EFL learners. The results further revealed that as in the previous studies, the American-English speakers rated spoken English sentences by two Japanese groups significantly more severely than Japanese speakers. [Work supported by JSPS.]