Bulletin

Issue: September 2004

News

Tongue of the speaker and ear of the hearer understanding intelligibility

Thanks to La Trobe University researchers, teachers in Australia's Adult Migrant English Program will soon have available a professional development package to help them assess the intelligibility of those at different stages of learning English.

Funded by the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) provides 510 hours of English language training to all people offered permanent residence in this country.

According to Dr Lynda Yates of the AMEP Research Centre, assessing intelligibility has long been a problem as it lies as much in 'the ear of the hearer' as the 'tongue of the speaker'. The new professional development package will greatly assist teachers in the AMEP.

The AMEP Research Centre is a consortium of La Trobe's Institute for Education, and the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research at Macquarie University. It was established in 2000 to provide professional development materials and information for AMEP providers and teachers. Other senior researchers in the Centre located at La Trobe's main Melbourne campus at Bundoora are Dr Howard Nicholas and Dr Alan Williams.

To illustrate that intelligibility is in the ear of the hearer, Dr Yates has studied reactions to the speech of beginner learners of English. She played tapes of the voices of five people learning English to 42 listeners - half of them to TESOL teachers (teachers of English as a second language) and half non-TESOL teachers.

'We found that, because of their experience, TESOL teachers understood much more of what the speakers were saying than the non-teachers,' Dr Yates said. 'But, if you asked for a rating of how intelligible the speakers were, there was greater variation among the teachers than the non-teachers.'

Many factors influence intelligibility, including the hearer's awareness of the subject matter, the volume of the voice, pronunciation, grammar - and even body language.

In a presentation to teachers at the National AMEP Conference held in Darwin in July, Dr Yates reported on her research and illustrated the role of some of these different factors in assessing intelligibility.

'Teachers were surprised to discover how much of their understanding of different speech samples depended on body language and the predictable nature of everyday conversations, rather than the clarity of the speech itself.'

This research, she said, underscored the need for a consensus about what level of intelligibility was acceptable at different stages of language learning in the AMEP, and highlighted an urgent need for professional development for teachers working in the program.

Dr Yates' new package comprises a CD of learner spoken performances for use in professional development training sessions and a fact sheet that can be downloaded free from the AMEP Research Centre's Professional Connections website. The package will join a range of other learning materials available from the Centre to AMEP teachers.

Further information about these packages is available on www.nceltr.mq.edu.au/resources.

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