THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG

UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES

TRẦN THẢO UYÊN

A STUDY OF SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY

OF VIETNAMESE STUDENTS MAJORING
IN ENGLISH AT THE PEDAGOGICAL
COLLEGE OF DALAT

Major: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

Code: 60.22.02.01

RESEARCH PROPOSAL
MASTER THESIS

Da Nang, 2016
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I. INTRODUCTION

1.1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY

Since Vietnam’s participation in the World Trade Organization on January 11th, 2007,
with the ongoing development of the current economy, English has been serving as a
common means of international communication throughout the country. The Ministry of
Education and Training, therefore, has already made English a compulsory subject in the
academic curriculum, from the third grade upwards. The need for English conversations has
never been more urgent. However, modern English is a living and changing language
(Sesnan, 2001) when it is used to communicate between different cultural backgrounds in
every aspect of human life. “The change is seen in the English used in different parts of the
world and also in changes from generation to generation” (ibid., p.24). As a result, foreign
language learners in general and Vietnamese learners of English in particular inevitably
encounter different obstacles to communicate in English. Among various factors for
successful oral communication, Connolly (1986) claims that the speaker’s intelligibility to
listeners is one of the most fundamental characteristics.

Over the last thirty years, numerous studies have examined the relationship between
speech intelligibility and features that may interfere with intelligibility. With the concerns
about phonetic features and pronunciation teaching, applied linguistic scholars including
Reed & Michaud (2011), Lepage & Busà (2014), Becker & Kluge (2014), Snyder &
Kashiwagi (2014), O’Neal (2015), and Shah (2016) have looked into phonetic and
phonological factors as well as their significant impacts on the intelligibility of English. On
the other hand, Munro & Derwing (1995), Kim (2008), Jung (2010), and Zoghbor (2016)
focused on the interrelationships among accentedness, perceived comprehensibility and
intelligibility in the speech of L2 learners. Other researches were carried out with an attention
to the reduced intelligibility caused by the surrounding noise and reverberant rooms (Brocaar
& Verschuure, 1983; Clopper & Bradlow, 2008; Zahorik & Brandewie, 2010; Brown &
Bacon, 2010; Zahorik & Srinivasan, 2014) or the intelligibility of speech in hearing impaired
learners (Hustad, 2008; Saedi, Alavi & Behzadi, 2013).
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Once speech intelligibility is regarded as one of the main goals for English teaching and
acquisition, the world sees an increase in the number of researchers investigating the
intelligibility of English speeches given by nonnative international speakers such as
Brazilian, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese and Korean. In Vietnam, nevertheless, the
speech intelligibility is rather far from clear and its effects on international communication
still remain unresolved. Consequently, it is about time to figure out how intelligible English
speeches of Vietnamese learners are and which elements are important or less crucial for their
intelligibility. To gain a better understanding of these issues, a correlation research on speech
intelligibility is carried out at The Pedagogical College of Dalat with the hope of identifying
speech intelligibility levels of English learners who have intentions of becoming English
teachers responsible for the language improvement of Vietnamese young generations. In
addition, the study is expected to bring out major causes of problems as well as possible
implications.

1.2. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

1.2.1. Aims of the study
This study aims at investigating the intelligibility levels of students majoring in English
at the Pedagogical College of Dalat. The study also searches for main factors that affect
learner’s intelligibility. Based on the findings of this study, some solutions will be suggested
to help non-native English learners improve their speech intelligibility in the contexts of
globalization interactions.

1.2.2. Objectives
To achieve the aims of the study, the following objectives are intended to:
- Identify the level of speech intelligibility of EFL learners at the Pedagogical
College of Dalat;
- Find out if there are any correlations between the students’ intelligibility and
other variables such as gender, religions, years of leaning English, pronunciation
errors, the familiarity with vocabulary, variety of the topic and cultural factors;
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- Analyze pronunciation problems and explain some of the reasons why the
pronunciation errors occurred;
- Make some recommendations to help EFL students improve their speech
intelligibility and to communicate effectively.

1.3. SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This study will examine the intelligibility levels of college students through English
conversations and speech recordings, each of which lasts two or three minutes. However, due
to the limited time and resources, the investigation will be restricted to 3 groups of 15 EFL
students at the Pedagogical College of Dalat (15 freshmen, 15 sophomores, and 15 seniors).
With a Sample Size of 45 students and an expected percentage of 93%, the confidence
interval is 6.91 (http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm#one). The intelligibility evaluation
will be done by six EFL teachers (2 native speakers of British, 2 native speakers of American
and 2 native speakers of Vietnamese) who have had more than four years of teaching
experience. Further analysis of influential factors will only focus on 7 variables: participants’
gender, religions, years of learning English, pronunciation errors, the familiarity with
vocabulary, topic’s variety and cultural factors.

1.4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The following questions are posed, based on the aims and objectives mentioned above,
to guide the research process:

1. What are the levels of speech intelligibility presented by EFL students at the
Pedagogical College of Dalat?
2. What are possible differences, if any, in terms of intelligibility between students of
different genders, years of studying English, and cultural factors?
3. Are there any correlations, if any, between students’ intelligibility and the variety of
topics, students’ familiarity with vocabulary, students’ accents, and students’
pronunciation?
4. What are the specific problems with the students’ pronunciation errors?
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1.5. DEFINITIONS OF THE TERM

The word “intelligibility” has its Latin origin date back to the 18th century. Johnson
(1775) notes in his dictionary, “INTE'LLIGIBLE. a. [intelligibilis, Latin.] to be conceived by
the underftanding. INTELLIGIBI'LITY. ʃ. [from intelligible.] 1. Poffibility to be
underftood. 2. The power of underftanding; intellection.”

However, Munro & Derwing, in 1995, stated that it was impossible to gain universal
agreement to define and assess intelligibility. According to Kenworthy (as cited in Zoghbor,
2016), intelligibility is similar to understandability regardless of a dearth of word’s
identification. In contrast, Smith (1992:76) divides understanding into three separate
categories as follows:
(1) Intelligibility: word/utterance recognition;
(2) Comprehensibility: word/utterance meaning (locutionary force);
(3) Interpretability: meaning behind word/utterance (illocutionary force).

Three years later, Munro & Derwing (1995) broadly defined intelligibility as “the extent
to which a speaker’s message is actually understood by a listener” (p.76). More recently, in
addition, Jenkins (2000) has widened out the definition of intelligibility by referring to “a
dynamic construct in which listener and speaker negotiate word and utterance recognition”
(p.72).

In this study, the working definition is identified mainly based on the definition of
Munro & Derwing (1995): intelligibility is the extent to which a speaker’s message is
actually understood by a listener. Speakers in this case are 45 students majoring in English at
the Pedagogical College of Dalat and listeners are 6 EFL teachers having an English master
degree and four-year experience of teaching English.

1.6. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The findings of this study will firstly contribute to the benefit of English learners who
want to use English as an international language. Furthermore, learners are able to gain more
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confidence, pick up English in a more effective way, and achieve realistic goals in
international communication. This study will also be beneficial to the pedagogical
methodology of EFL teachers when they set up different communication contexts to help
non-native students communicate better with a diversity of English users. Finally, it will be
able to serve as a future reference for researchers on the subject of language intelligibility.
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II. LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter briefly summarizes eight previous studies in the area of English
intelligibility and describes the theoretical background about intelligibility measurement.

2.1. PREVIOUS RESEARCHES RELATED TO THE STUDY

In 1995, Munro & Derwing investigated the interrelationships among accentedness,

comprehensibility and intelligibility in an experimental study with the participation of 18
native speakers of English and 10 Mandarin native speakers. After recording English
speeches of the ten proficient learners, two researchers had the other participants listen and
write out exactly what they had heard. Right after that, listeners completed a Likert scale
numbered from 1 to 9 which represent the levels of intelligibility. Another 9-point scale was
given to each listener four days later so as to rate the degree of foreign accent. It then came to
some conclusions, based on the study results, stating that comprehensibility scores match up
with intelligibility scores and that the speakers’ strong foreign accents somehow affect the
comprehensibility and intelligibility of L2 speech. The scholars finally raised two problems
for ESL pronunciation teachers to take into further consideration.

Applying the same method of measuring intelligibility as Munro & Derwing did, Kim
(2008) asked 4 ESL teachers and 40 ESL learners to join the study. Due to participants’
different internationalities of American, Spanish, Japanese and Korea, their accentedness
scores fluctuated from 3 to 6 on the 9-point scale although their perceptions about foreign
accent were similar. Most importantly, there was a sharp contrast with the assertion of Munro
& Derwing. It was stated by Kim that “accentedness, perceived comprehensibility,
intelligibility and interpretability were all independent dimensions” (ibid.,p.21). Only
accentedness had impact on speakers’ perceived comprehensibility, and there was no
correlation between accentedness and intelligibility.

It was not until 2014 that Lepage & Busà considered word stress and vowel reduction
as main factors impacting the intelligibility. The perception test designed for 40 French and
Italian learners of English was administered by 32 native judges who listened and analyzed
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the speakers’ words to identify their intelligibility. According to the test results, incorrect
vowel reduction had more negative impacts on intelligibility than incorrect stress placement.

In the same year, Becker & Kluge (2014) conducted intelligibility experiments upon 80
Brazilian students of English language. The participants listened and took notes of a text
given by one of the eight speakers from America, China, Germany and Japan. The
experiments led to two conclusions indicating that (1) Japanese speakers gained the lowest
intelligibility scores while the others reached equivalent results for intelligibility and (2)
consonants and consonant clusters were thought to be vital for speech intelligibility.

Paying more attention to English learners of Asian countries, Jung (2010) carried out a
study including 91 Korean university students in order to explore the influence of
pronunciation on intelligibility and comprehensibility. For the conclusion, the author
emphasized that factors like pronunciation, intonation, stress, socio-cultural and pragmatic
features are important to accomplish intelligibility and comprehensibility. Besides, Snyder &
Kashiwagi (2014) made a comparison between the speech of one female American speaker
and 19 speech samples of Japanese female freshmen, some of whom already spent their
childhood in Australia. Unlike the previous experiments, instead of getting no preparation for
the speech, Japanese speakers firstly performed two 16.3-word utterances which had been
prepared in advance. Then they supported the experimenter to record a 126-word passage.
These recordings, in the next stage, were transcribed in standard orthography and rated for
accentedness by six native and non-native listeners. The results revealed that Japanese
speakers had serious problems with intelligibility. Therefore, Japanese students were
suggested to improve their pronunciation because mispronunciation, especially that of
vowels, negatively influenced intelligibility.

It is worth mentioning studies targeting at Vietnamese learners. Though few local

linguists have investigated the intelligibility of Vietnamese EFL learners, some international
scholars are interested in this object. Cunningham (2009a) implemented a study to explore
reasons for the breakdowns in intelligibility of English speakers living in Vietnam.
Cunningham began with reviewing the language learning conditions in Vietnam where there
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were limited chances for real English communication, following by describing the most
popular problems related to English pronunciation of Vietnamese learners. Thanks to the
speeches performed by a group of graduate Hanoian students, the researcher summed up
three factors of Vietnamese-accented English which make their utterances unintelligible.
Those factors were unclear vowel quality, unnoticeable vowel duration, and spontaneous
modifications of the target language.

To provide more evidence and analysis for those who are concerned about the
unintelligibility of Vietnamese native speakers, Cunningham (2009b), in an attempt to depict
the vowel systems, worked with 16 Vietnamese women who were working or studying at a
university in Hanoi for the purpose of making a comparison with a control case of seven
Swedish-speaking females. Despite having different periods of learning English, all of the
Vietnamese informants faced difficulties in producing intelligible speeches. Two sets of
research material contributed to display four reasons for this phenomenon: the elision of final
consonants and consonant clusters, the release of final stops, the difference in vowel quality,
and the dissimilarity of vowel duration in relation to postvocalic voicing.

Last but not least, a quantitative research involving the effect of Vietnamese flat-tone
on intelligibility was conducted by Dang (2013). The research focused on 50 Vietnamese
EFL freshmen studying at a university in Vietnam. There were 5 native speakers and 5 non-
native speakers participating to judge the above- mentioned informants’ intelligibility. Each
informant read a text of 312 English words and the recording was then measured in terms of
rhythm. The judges’ comments proved an important impact of Vietnamese mid-level tone on
their intelligibility. The study results, additionally, gave 4 basic criteria for the intelligibility
measurement process: “contrast of rhythm features between two languages with foci on the
transfer of L1 to the target language; dictation task; objective subjectivity of judges; and their
comments” (ibid., p.107).

2.2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

There are different ways to measure intelligibility. Hustad (2008, p.563) asserted:
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There are several different ways that intelligibility can be measured. One method is
orthographic transcription of standard speech samples by naïve listeners (see Giolas
& Epstein, 1963; Tikofsky & Tikofsky, 1964; Yorkston & Beukelman, 1981; Garcia
& Cannito, 2996). In this paradigm, listeners hear a speech sample (usually sentence-
length), and then write down what they thought the speaker said. Constituent
transcribed words are scored as either correct or incorrect based on whether they
match the intended words of the speaker. Percent intelligibility scores are calculated
by taking the number of words identified correctly divided by the number of words
possible, multiplied by 100.

Additionally, as cited in Munron & Derwing (1995, p.77), Barefoot, Bochner, Johnson,
and von Eigen, in the attempts to measure intelligibility, calculated the percentages of key
words recognized in the speakers’ utterances, whereas Brodkey cared about the accuracy of
paraphrases.

In this study, the evaluation of intelligibility is carried out in association with the
transcripts of informants’ speeches and judges’ comments on intelligibility based on a 5-point
Likert scale, a responding scale allowing participants to show their opinion on a series of
perceptive items (Madu, 2003, p.7).
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III. RESEARCH METHODS

3.1. METHODOLOGY

This study adopts a combination of research methods including descriptive method and
analytical method with the use of both quantitative research design and qualitative approach.

Initially, the quantitative approach is applied to evaluate the levels of speech

intelligibility. Assessors listen to recordings of English speeches and compare them with
given transcripts. The number of exact word matches mainly reflects the levels of speech
intelligibility. Inversely, imperfect intelligibility occurs when there is a certain amount of
discrepancy between the speech and transcription. Furthermore, responses on the remark
paper using a 5-point Likert scale can contribute substantially to researcher’s perceptions of
EFL learners’ intelligibility as well as major affecting features.

SPSS software will be used to compare means of the groups to see if there are any
correlations or differences between these independent variables, e.g. gender, years of
studying, etc.

In the following stage, the study is qualitative as it focuses on analyzing linguistic

features, speech dialects, cultural factors, and topic’s variety for the purpose of identifying
factors that interfere with speech intelligibility.

3.2. SELECTED SUBJECTS AND SAMPLING OF THE STUDY

In accordance with the study’s objectives, the sampling of the study will be chosen
randomly in order for each sample to be relatively fair.

3.2.1. Participants

The speech samples used in this experiment will be recorded from three groups of
fifteen Vietnamese EFL learners between the ages of 18 to 24 (from the first-year to the third-
year). All of the 45 Vietnamese-speaking informants in this study are undergraduate students
of English at Dalat’s TTC. Each participant will read aloud a reading text taken from IELTS
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examinations. After the pronunciation test, participants will choose a topic to discuss with
their partners before answering some questions from the researcher.

3.2.2. Assessors

Six EFL teachers (3 natives and 3 non-natives) will take part in this study as assessors.
With regards to the judges’ expertise, they all have a master degree either in TESOL or
linguistics and at least four years of teaching English in Vietnam. All six evaluators will be
carefully instructed on how to assess the informants’ intelligibility. Each assessor will listen
to 15 recordings of English speeches produced by a random group mentioned above. While
listening, they will compare the given transcript with what they really heard from the
recordings. Perfect intelligibility occurs when the speech and transcript are similar. Upon the
completion of this step, the judges will clarify their rating for intelligibility levels by circling
a Likert-scale’s number from 1 to 5 (1 = extremely unintelligible and 5 = completely
intelligible). Assessors are also stimulated to give their own comments on the students’
problems or factors that interfere with students’ speech intelligibility.

3.3. Data collection instruments

To serve this study, data are collected by three kinds of instruments: questionnaires,
interviews and SPSS. First of all, all participants will complete a questionnaire about factors
affecting the quality of their English conversations. Second, participants will read out loud a
given authorized text. Third, they are given a range of topics to choose for the purpose of
discussing with their partners. After that, participants will talk to the researcher about a
specific topic by answering a number of questions. All of the speeches and conversations will
be recorded for later analysis. Finally, SPSS is used to point out main factors that affect the
levels of intelligibility.

3.4. Data analysis procedure

After data are collected, the speech recordings of EFL Vietnamese learners will be
examined, assessed, and analyzed to identity the relationships between speech intelligibility
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and independent variables as well as dependent variables. The followings are procedure for
the data analysis.
- Collecting data related to participants’ speech intelligibility.
- Assessors listen to the recordings, compare with a given transcript, and evaluate
the level of intelligibility on a 5-point Likert scale. Points given to each section of data are
designed specifically in accordance with text reading, conversing in general, pronunciation
errors, and cultural understanding.
- Results from assessors will be entered to SPSS data sheets. Comparison of
Means will be operated.
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IV. LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

Sampling restriction is considered one of the major disadvantages. First, there is no

equal number of male and female informants because a majority of the participants are
females as a characteristic of the English Education major. Therefore, the gender bias will
somehow exist.

Second, the number of participants taking part in this investigation is still limited. In
consequences, the generalized possibilities are not really high.

In this study, moreover, the process of recording speeches will take place in a classroom
at the Pedagogical Colledge of Dalat. It is thus impossible for the researcher to gain as perfect
conditions as in professional studios.

Finally, researches of Vietnamese authors inside the country have not been covered in
this study. This leads to a lack of internal literature review.

V. ORGANISATION OF THE STUDY

This study consists of 5 main chapters as follows:

- Chapter 1, “the introduction of the study”, includes the rationale, aims and objectives,
scope of the study, research questions, definitions of the term, and significance of the study.

- Chapter 2, “the literature review and theoretical background”, includes two parts. The
part of literature review presents shortly the previous studies related to the thesis while the
other consists of background to intelligibility measurement.

- Chapter 3, “research methods”, presents the methodology, selected subjects and

sampling of the study, data collection instruments and data analysis procedure.
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- Chapter 4, “findings and discussion”, describes the study results of speech

intelligibility levels achieved from the data collected, accompanying with an analysis of the
interrelationships between students’ intelligibility and variables.

- Chapter 5, “conclusion and implications”, sums up the research conclusion and

provides readers with some recommendations to help EFL students improve their
intelligibility.

VI. TIMELINE OF THE STUDY

The proposed timeline for the research is described as follows:

Work Time

- Reading materials, collecting data, analyzing from Jun 20th, 2016 to Sep 5th, 2016
data, and writing the research proposal

- Protecting the research proposal and doing from Sep 25th, 2016 to Oct 7th, 2016
some works after protect the proposal

- Writing the thesis from Oct 7th, 2016 to Apr 30th, 2017

- Editing the thesis from May 1st, 2017 to May 31st, 2017

- Protecting the official thesis in August 2017

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