Intelligibility of and Attitude toward World Englishes Judged by Korean EFL High School Students: Focusing on Hindi and Chinese Accents of English

Abstract

This study investigates intelligibility of Hindi- and Chinese-accented English by Korean high school students and their attitude toward the English varieties accents from an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) perspective. With globalization, English in international interactions is now used more between non-native English learners than between L1 speakers and non-native speakers. In this ELF circumstance, a lot of research focusing on the intelligibility principle and language attitude has been conducted. Nevertheless, there has been little research putting focus on intelligibility of non-native English speeches by Korean learners and their attitude toward the speeches. As a result, three research questions were developed as follows: (a) Is there a significant difference between intelligibility of the two different L1-accented speeches (Hindi-accented and Mandarin-accented speech) for Korean learners of English?

(b) What are the factors that impeded the intelligibility?

(c) What attitude do Korean students have toward the two different L1-accented speeches? In order to answer these questions, an intelligibility test and an attitude survey were conducted with a total of 42 Korean high school students and 12 native speakers of English. They were divided into two groups and participated in a word transcription task for the intelligibility test and an attitude survey. In the intelligibility test, listeners transcribed excerpts read by each speaker from India or China. Intelligibility was determined by the accuracy of their transcriptions of words. After the intelligibility test, they were asked to show their attitude toward the accent through the questionnaire. The tasks were then followed by a post interview which was performed to get a deeper understanding of the errors committed by the participants. The findings of the study show that for the Korean learners, the Mandarin-accented English was significantly less intelligible than the Hindi-accented English. The error analysis presented that word familiarity and accent familiarity are closely related with intelligibility. Analyses of the errors also revealed mixed results about the Lingua Franca Core (Jenkins, 2000). The Korean learners attitude toward the two accents yielded a disfavor rating for both accents. In contrast, the native speakers showed more positive attitude toward the Hindi-accented English than the Mandarin-accented English, which is also found to be related with accent familiarity factor. In conclusion, in order to improve intelligibility of the two accent varieties and have generous attitude toward a variety of Englishes in the ELF context on the part of the Korean students, English teaching needs to not only combine listening tasks with vocabulary building, but also, more importantly, raise awareness of a variety of Englishes and introduce phonological features of them.