ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#39 | November 11 , 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036
Evolution of human civilizations has it that there has been cross continental communication much before the idea of English as an international language existed. For centuries there has been international trade done across the continents. Traders have been interacting with one another. Undoubtedly, with difficulties at both the ends, i.e. speaker and listener, they somehow devised some strategies and managed to communicate. Therefore, those who are in genuine need of communication have found out ways and means to communicate. With the passage of time, one single language medium gained centrality in various human activities. It became thereafter imperative to standardize the information transaction amongst the concerned users with their different backgrounds. Hence, the question of intelligibility of one language medium amidst its disparate users has attracted researcher’s attention globally.
Intelligibility in English indeed is a concern in EFL and EIL contexts, yet the situation is not as alarming as we perceive it to be. With regards intelligibility Smith states:
‘My response …is that for at least last two hundred years there have been English speaking people in some parts of the world who have not been intelligible to other English speaking people in other parts of the world it is a natural phenomenon when any language becomes so wide spread (2006: 430)’.
Smith’s position on the issue allows some space for empirical inquiry with regards intelligibility in the back drop of emerging contexts of EIL. His views sets aside reflexive cry ‘something must be done!’ and paves a way for a reasoned exploration.
The word intelligibility has its origin in the Latin verb ‘intellegere’ which means to understand or to perceive. Intelligibility principally refers to one’s ability to clearly convey ideas in a way that listener understands the intended meaning without any confusion in minimum possible efforts. Intelligibility may be broadly defined as the extent to which a speaker’s message is actually understood by a listener (Munro & Derwing: 289). However broad this definition may seem, it implies at least two different types of understanding. First, successfully identifying words and secondly understanding a speaker’s intended meaning. Considering this intelligibility can be seen as the ability of listeners to accurately decode individual words in the stream of speech or, the ability of a speaker to utter words in a way that listeners can decode the utterance. Therefore intelligibility signifies both “intelligible production and felicitous interpretation of English” (Nelson: 1995: 274). It is evident now that both the speaker and the listeners occupy the centre in the intelligibility discourse. Currently, intelligibility is widely agreed to be the most important goal for spoken language development, for both listening and speaking in both ESL and EFL settings. Intelligibility depends on various speaker-listener factors like situation, register, and other elements of context. Therefore developing standards for intelligibility would depend on various listener speaker factors.
Although there is no agreement among scholars regarding what qualifies as intelligible, the conceptualization of the term by Nelson and Smith in 1985 is generally accepted. The idea of intelligibility can be explained by Smith’s three- layer ‘framework’. They employ three layers, viz. Intelligibility, Comprehensibility and Interpretability to analyze the complex process of acquiring understanding of an utterance. Thus this three-layer scheme—intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability—forms the basic orientation on intelligibility.
Apparently intelligibility refers to level of sound and phrasing into recognizable or plausible words. Comprehensibility, the level of complexity in Smith’s analysis refers to assigning meaning to the utterance, approximately the conventional basic sense of ‘understanding’. For example, successful comprehensibility involves apprehending an utterance ‘table’ as meaning ‘table’, the word, and recognizing that it refers to an appropriate category or specific referent in the world so that it fits meaningfully into current utterance as in Please put the package on the table, Invite the guests of the committee to the table, Table the motion or Insert data into cells in a table. (Kachru, Nelson: 68). Interaction can fail at this level, especially when the term employed by the speaker is not familiar to the listener. It has to do with culture and context both. For instance the meaning of an utterance I will give you a ring in the evening made to a woman colleague in the office would vary depending on nationality of the listener. The meaning an Indian woman colleague would assign to the phrase the ring will be ‘telephone ring’, meaning the speaker will give the listener a call in the evening. On the other hand the meaning an American woman colleague would assign to the same phrase would be an ‘engagement ring’. This variation in the meaning is a result of the difference in the culture which has an impact on the context. In the instance above intelligibility is high but comprehensibility is low.
Interpretability, beyond recognition of medium and its elements (intelligibility) and recognition of meaning which may be reasonably assigned to words and phrases (comprehensibility) within a specific context, is the speaker’s ability to discern the purpose and intent of an utterance ( Kachru, Nelson: 68).
Intelligibility consists of ‘complex factors comprising recognizing an expression, knowing its meaning, and knowing what the meaning signifies in the socio cultural contexts’ (Bangbose, 1998: 11). Bangbose’s account on intelligibility is in line with Smith and Nelson’s three term scheme. He uses the term to cover both the speaker and listener factors arguing that in communication both the speaker and the listener contribute to speech and its interpretation. Since communication is a two-way process, it requires equal involvement of both the addresser (sender) and the addressee (receiver) for intelligible communication. For a successful transmission from addresser to addressee, an idea passes through a complex neuro-psychological process beginning from encoding to transmission which includes proper selection of medium(s) and channel, to decoding and finally ending with a feedback given by the receiver. Besides, a message can completely change in the process of transmission if there is problem at any stage in the process of communication.
The terms intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability are used interchangeably by the scholar involved in the intelligibility research. Due to this the terms have been perceived as ambiguous and confusing. In order to clarify the situation it was suggested by some scholars that the term intelligibility be reserved for word and utterance recognition, comprehensibility being used to refer for word and utterance meaning and interpretability to be reserved for grasping the speaker’s intention. Intelligibility as defined by Nelson and Smith come very close to Brown’s use of term identification which she used to mean recognizing of items such as names and telephone numbers.
The last level, i.e. interpretability, involves deriving the intended meaning. It is apparently difficult to judge and measure whether or not the listener has been able to grasp the intention of an utterance and hence, as Levis states, the term has largely “fallen by the wayside” (Nelson: 2005: 254). There remains two areas to look into as far as intelligibility is concerned, first, the phonological clarity of an utterance, in other words, “matters of form,” which includes proper recognition or decoding of words/utterances, and “matters of meaning,” generally designated as ‘comprehensibility,’ ‘understanding,’ or ‘communicativity’ (Jenkins, 2000: 71). As Field (2003) suggests, a listener might employ a higher level of understanding to make up for the fact that a message is unintelligible or unable to be precisely de-coded. In the same way, an utterance might be intelligible and incomprehensible, although as Gallego (cited in Peckering: 220) points out, potential comprehensibility issues may go under the guise of intelligibility problems. Intelligibility literature is full of versions on the parameters to be employed for various layer of intelligibility. What is generally agreed upon is the fact that intelligibility can be attained at said three levels i.e. recognizing the words, associating corresponding meaning to it and understanding the intention of an utterance and both the speaker and the listener should contribute to achieving it.
The review of related literature indicates that there is still no general consensus in the use of the term intelligibility whether viewed from a speaker or listener perspective. In other words terminological confusion, to which Nelson and Smith drew attention in 1985, is still with us. Whichever the term actually may be used for the concept of formal recognition and recognizability of words and utterances, matters of form are considered by their writers to be of minor relevance when compared to matters of meaning. (Jenkins: 2000: 71)
Although there are numerous terms used for different layers of understanding an utterance, Smith’s three level ‘framework’—intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability should be used to avoid confusion.
The dynamics of global English are changing because more than ever before one sees interaction between NNS-NNS compared to NS-NNS and intelligibility this interaction is a major concern among intelligibility researchers across the world. Kachru(1982, 1988) while classifying three cone centric circles states that there is continuous growth in number of speakers in the outer and expanding circle hence, more and more interaction is taking place among NNS-NNS compared to NS-NNS. For the first time in the history of English language, L2 speakers outnumber those for whom it is L1 and interactions in English increasingly involve no L1 speakers whatsoever (Jenkins: 12). Apparently, then, majority of interaction in English involves NNS-NNS interlocutors. In this context it would be wrong to base our judgments regarding intelligibility considering native accent as a yardstick. Levis (2005) takes Kachru’s idea further in his speaker-listener matrix signposts that most of the research conducted so far is in the direction of NS-NNS interaction and therefore there is a lot of research space in the area of NNS-NNS interaction in outer and expanding circles.
To sum up it can be stated without any doubt that international intelligibility is of paramount importance in the emerging contexts of EIL and the research on intelligibility is moving in the direction of Kachru’s paradigm shift from NS centric pedagogical norms to NNS centric norms, in spite of the fact that NS models are still held as the suitable for teaching pronunciation. Presently global communication in EIL contexts operate under different conditions than popularly perceived NS-NS or NS -NNS interaction, and that for international intelligibility in English native models are no longer relevant to increasing amount NNS-NNS interactions. However, there is sufficient research evidence to suggest that EIF interlocutors indulge in communication strategies and converge according to the context in order negotiate intelligibility. Moreover, intelligibility has a direct relation to sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic issues like context, identity, attitudes, L1 transfer etc. These factors should be considered while conceptualizing the pedagogical framework for intelligibility for NNS. This requires the reexaminations key of principles that have guided our teaching and research practices. In nutshell the research which takes NNS in consideration and discards the centrality of NS in passing the judgment about intelligibility is in its initial stages. Hence there is a lot of space for research in this done in this direction.
LIST OF THE ABBREVIATIONS USED
- ESL English as a Second Language
- EFL English as a Foreign Language
- EIL English as an International Language
- MTI Mother Tongue Interference
- NS Native Speaker
- NNS Non-native Speaker
- GIE General Indian English
- WE World Englishes
- RP Received Pronunciation
- ELT English Language Teaching
- L1 First Language/Mother Tongue
- L2 Second Language
REFERENCES
Bansal, R. K.,The Intelligibility of Indian English, Monograph No. 4, Second (abridged) edition, Hyderabad: CIFL. 1985. Print.
Bangbose, A., “World English and Globalization” World Englishes, 20. 2006. 357-64. Print.
Derwing, T. and M. Munro. “Foreign Accent, Intelligibility and Comprehensibility: Evidence from four L1s.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 19. 1997: 285-309. Print.
Jenkins, Jennifer. The Phonology of English as an International Language. OUP. New York, 2000. Print.
Levis, J.,“Changing Contexts and Shifting Paradigms in Pronunciation Teaching.” TESOL Quarterly 39.2 (2005): 369-377.Print.
Nelson, C., “Intelligibility and world Englishes in the classroom.” World Englishes, 14(1995):273–279.Print.
Pickering, Lucy., “Current Research on Intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 26, (2006): 219-233. Web 24th June, 2010
Smith, L., and Nelson C., “World Englishes and Issues of Intelligibility” Kachru,B., Kachru, Y., and Nelson L., World Englishes in Asian contexts. Hong Kong. Hong Kong UP. 2006. Print.
Smith, L. and Nelson C., “International intelligibility of English: Directions and resources” WorldEnglishes 4, 1985: 333-342. Print.