Intelligibility in ELF interactions: Pronunciation issues and a theory of foreign speech perception

The majority of research to date has focused on the interactions between Native Speakers (NS) and Non-Native Speakers (NNS) of English. However, the vast majority of English spoken around the world is between NNS, a variety known as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Some scholars argue that there is a significant gap in our understanding of NNS-NNS interactions. Moreover, there have been challenges to traditional Second Language Acquisition (SLA) perspectives shrouded in NS ideology. One such challenge relates to the tendency of research to focus solely on NSs’ judgments of intelligibility. This presentation begins with a definition of key terms and then puts forward a novel method for the study of intelligibility. There is also a discussion of research into the intelligibility of English as an Additional Language (L2) speech, which is divided into speaker and listener related factors. The implications of these findings for future research conclude the presentation.