Intelligibility in spoken ELF

Abstract

1. IntroductionA crucial issue that often arises in research into English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) speech is how intelligible it is. There is a misguided belief among some people that ELF speech may be less intelligible internationally than that of native-speakers; but there is actually little evidence to support this assertion. Furthermore, we need to know not just how intelligible it is, but also which features of pronunciation interfere with intelligibility and which have little or no impact. Research we are conducting at the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD) is exploring this issue.A little over a decade ago, Jenkins (2000) investigated the features of pro-nunciation that caused misunderstandings between speakers from different countries. On the basis of this research, she proposed a Lingua Franca Core (LFC) of those features of pronunciation that are important for international intelligibility, and she suggested that, for ELF, it is not necessary to teach other features of pronunciation, though of course some learners might choose to adopt native speech patterns more closely.This work was rather controversial, as many people were startled at the suggestion that there is no need to encourage learners of English to imitate all features of the pronunciation of native speakers as closely as possible, and indeed her ideas continue to be hotly debated and widely misunderstood (Jen-kins, 2009). Nevertheless, some of the suggestions have now been accepted (e.g. Kirkpatrick, 2007), some materials have been developed for ELF-based teaching (Walker, 2010), and the impact for pronunciation teaching in places such as China has been explored (Deterding, 2011).However, we still need far more data on patterns of interactions between ELF speakers in order to determine which features of pronunciation are crucial for intelligibility and which are less important. This paper briefly describes research at UBD that is investigating data in this area.