Let’s keep three questions at the forefront of our minds:
Question 1. What do we mean by intelligibility?
Following on from pioneering work in the late 1970s, researchers Larry Smith and Cecil Nelson (1985) situated intelligibility within a three-way construct that also involved comprehensibility and interpretability. In their system ‘intelligibility’ referred to the recognition of words and utterances in the speech flow. That is to say, the listener’s ability to recognise individual words and phrases in a speaker’s utterance irrespective of whether or not they were able to comprehend the meaning of the message that these words and phrases were trying to convey.
This definition of the term ‘intelligibility’ is now widely accepted in applied linguistics, and gives us our answer to the first question. A speaker is being intelligible if the listener can recognise what they are saying at the level of the words/phrases the speaker is pronouncing, regardless of how accented the listener judges the speaker to be, or how much effort is needed to follow the speaker, and even if the listener doesn’t actually grasp the meaning of what the speaker is trying to communicate.
Question 2. Can we measure intelligibility?
The simple answer is ‘Yes’. Smith and Rafiqzad (1979), for example, had listeners fill in a text from which every sixth word had been deleted in an exercise very similar to a cloze–test. Derwing and Munro, in contrast, have used a variety of techniques to assess intelligibility over the years, including True/False questions, comprehension questions, and transcription.
Needless to say, whichever of these techniques is employed there are problems in being sure that you are assessing intelligibility in complete isolation from other factors. Sometimes our knowledge of the topic being spoken about can make a word or phrase intelligible when it wouldn’t be to a listener who is new to the subject. Assessing intelligibility, then, is not a clinical science. However, as anyone who has ever tried to write down the lyrics of a favourite song or to transcribe a piece of authentic speech knows, one of the most complete and reliable tests of intelligibility is transcription.
Because of its evident importance, a lot of work has been done to examine intelligibility both in L1 and in L2 use of English. However, as Joanne Rajadurai pointed out in a review of this work back in 2007, the work done until then was not without its weaknesses. All too often, she concluded:
- accentedness and intelligibility were confused.
- intelligibility was seen as a one-way process, with no chance of intervention on the part of the listener.
- the judges of intelligibility were native speakers from the Inner Circle, with the research therefore ignoring the non-native-speaker listener who today is the most probable interlocutor.
- the listener’s attitude towards a given accent was, on occasions, seen to alter their judgment of intelligibility.
Despite the above caveats, the results of the research done so far, especially if we include more recent work on the intelligibility of English as an international language or lingua franca, are of undeniable importance to pronunciation teaching since they allow us to steer classroom practice towards this critical goal.
Question 3. Can you teach intelligibility?
As with Question 2, the simple answer is ‘Yes’. And as with Question 2, in reality, it’s a little more complex than we’d like it to be. In part, this is because intelligibility is not a characteristic of spoken English that belongs solely with the speaker, as researchers have stressed from the beginning. A speaker who is perfectly intelligible to one person might not be intelligible to another. When I’m listening to BBC World Service on the radio, for example, I assume that the different speakers are intelligible to the journalists who are running the programme, but some of what some of the guests say, is definitely not intelligible to me.
Lack of familiarity with an accent can compromise intelligibility, and there were definitely accents of English that I struggled to understand when I first started listening to the BBC, including native-speaker accents.
But there is enough data from research into intelligibility for us to be able to identify features of spoken English that seem to mark out more intelligible from less or unintelligible speech. The work of Derwing and Munro (2005), for example, points towards a number of factors as being significant in increasing a speaker’s intelligibility. These include:
- general speaking habits
- volume
- lexical stress
- nuclear stress
- rhythm
- syllable structure
- segmentals with a high functional load
From her base in France, practitioner Alice Henderson (2007) set about trying to improve her students’ intelligibility despite (or because of) the limited time-frame in which she had to do this. And it was the need to improve my students’ intelligibility back in the 1990s that brought me into the field of pronunciation teaching in a personal search for what mattered most for improvements in my own students’ intelligibility.
But perhaps the most significant work on intelligibility in the 21st century has come from Jennifer Jenkins. In her seminal work on the pronunciation and English as an international language (2000), Jenkins examines intelligibility between non-native speakers and comes up with compelling, empirical evidence to show that some things matter more than others if we want our students’ pronunciation to be as intelligible as possible to as many listeners as possible.
There isn’t space to go into Jenkins’ proposals here, so I’ll start to do that in the next post when we look at the two Js. No, it’s not a comedy duo. It’s a reference to Jenner and Jenkins, the terrible twins of pronunciation teaching for having put the cat in the very midst of the pigeons at the end of the last century. The name Jennifer Jenkins is familiar to us all (or should be) and provokes all sorts of reactions from pronunciation experts around the world, not all of which are complimentary. But the real guilty party, the real fly in the ointment, is, as we shall see next month, Bryan Jenner, the father of the Common Core.
References
Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2005). Second. Language Accent and Pronunciation Teaching: A Research-Based Approach. TESOL-Quarterly. 39/3: 379–397.
Henderson, A. (2008). ‘Short Course Focus on Intelligibility: What type of progress is possible?’, in Issues in Accents of English, Ed. Waniek-Klimczak E. Cambridge Scholars Press.
Jenkins, J. (2000). The Phonology of English as an International Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (p150)
Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M., (1995). Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners. Language learning, 49/1: 285–310.
Rajadurai, J. (2007). Intelligibility studies: a consideration of empirical and ideological issues. World Englishes,26/1: 87–98.
Smith, L. E. and C. Nelson. (1985). International intelligibility of English: directions and resources. World Englishes 4/3: 333–42.
