Factors Determining Global Intelligibility of EFL Learners in Asian Contexts

Abstract

Assuming that global intelligibility should be the goal of pronunciation instruction at EFL classrooms, this study aimed at investigating its contributing factors. To reach the aim, this study involved five Japanese and six Indonesian senior high school students as the providers of EFL utterances, and five English native speakers and five ESL speakers as the assessors who were required to evaluate the EFL speakers’ utterances. The collected data were then submitted to a step-wise multiple regression to examine the potential contribution of the investigated factors to global intelligibility. First, the results have disclosed that there was a significant difference in the assessment of the contributing factors between the ENL speakers and the ESL speakers, either for Japanese EFL learners or for Indonesian EFL learners. Secondly, the findings have disclosed that sound accuracy, word stress, and adjustments in

Keywords: pronunciation instruction, global intelligibility, EFL learners