An Experimental Study On Listeners’ Intelligibility Of Chinese English Majors’ Free-talk

As the connection among most of the countries and districts is becoming much closer,English,as an international language,is playing an essential and irreplaceable role in the communication between different countries and districts.Therefore,with more and more frequent oral communication in English among different countries,mutual intelligibility is showing its significance especially in the field of pronunciation assessment of ESL.This thesis focuses on the intelligibility of several ESL learners’ extemporaneous speeches,as well as the potential factors that would greatly affect listeners’ intelligibility of ESL learners’ extemporaneous speeches.As for raters,this thesis has four different groups of raters to do the dictation task and the rating task.There are two English native speakers who are pronunciation teachers themselves,and two nonnative English speakers who have been dedicating themselves to English pronunciation teaching for more than 20 years,four advanced English post-graduate majors with CET Oral Test rating experience,and four senior students with pronunciation teaching and rating experience.Previous relevant studies show that factors like vowel,consonant,word stress and fluency could affect listeners’ understanding in varying degrees,therefore,this thesis would use qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis,which consists of a dictation task,a rating task,and some interviews,in order to assess which factor would have more powerful influence on listeners’ intelligibility when rating speakers’ extemporaneous speeches.Studies show that native speaker raters tend to be the one who transcribes most correct words in the dictation task,and they seem to be the most tolerant raters that give higher scores in the rating process.However,this study does not find sufficient statistic evidence to conclude which factor would have more powerful influence on listeners’ intelligibility.Taking the information from the interviews as well as the specific comments attached in the rating task into consideration,the dimension of fluency,sentence stress and pause seem to have bigger influence on listeners’ understanding,but more strong evidence is needed in further research.