Comprehensibility of Taiwanese College Students' English Oral Output as an International Langauge

• Main Author: 邱鈺瑾
• Other Authors: 吳靜芬
• Format: Others
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/18441095287645949030

碩士 === 國立嘉義大學 === 外國語言學系研究所 === 101 === Comprehensibility of Taiwanese College Students’ English Oral Output as an International Language Abstract With the increasing amount of contact between people from many different countries, and the English language has increasingly been recognized as the international language to facilitate communication among people of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In the global village time, people in Taiwan have increasing chances to interact with people around the world. With the inspiration of Jennifer Jenkins’ Lingua Franca Core (2000), how to speak comprehensible English to various English users is a key factor to join the international communication. This represents the debate that had occurred, over the last few decades about the scope of “GLOCAL English”, which created the issue of whether people around the world should keep an open mind to accept the diversity of Englishes, instead of focusing on one standard English language. In this analysis, the thesis puts forward that in human interaction, both the listeners and the speakers should share the responsibility so that the correct style of communication takes place. The working definition of language encompasses five structural components: phonology, semantics, syntax, morphology, and pragmatics. Within communication, these five components of language will be assessed as to how they could affect comprehension. When this was taken into consideration, the purposes of this study was to explore the comprehensibility of Taiwanese college student’s oral output to native English speakers (NEs) and non-native English speaker (NNEs) and what components of language affected their comprehensibility judgments, and finally to know their perceptions about the difficulty and gravity of judgments on the comprehensibility of Taiwan college students’ oral output. There were six participants from different countries who evaluated the thirty students English oral output. The evaluation form of this study had two parts, the first part was to understand the raters’ degree of comprehensibility of the students’ oral output and the second part was to highlight the components that could affect the comprehensibility on the students’ oral content. Finally, the questionnaire and interview were applied to investigate the evaluators’ perceptions about the difficulty of, and degree of, judgments on the comprehensibility based on the five language structural components. The findings of this study were as follow: 1. The degrees of comprehensibility were of no significant difference between the NEs and the NNEs groups of evaluators. 2. The factors that affected comprehensibility were different from the NNs and the NNEs evaluators. For the NEs evaluators, the rankings were as follows; from the main factor to the least main factor that affected the comprehensibility rating, syntax, phonology, pragmatics, morphology and semantics. As for the NNEs evaluators, the rankings were as follows; phonology syntax, semantics morphology and pragmatics. As the ranking showed, phonology and syntax were the two main components that affected the evaluators’ comprehensibility rating. In further indicated that the gap of evaluation between the NEs and the NNEs existed in phonology and pragmatics. 3. In the subjective perception part, for the NEs evaluators, syntax and pragmatics were the two most difficult errors types for them when they were rating, with phonology and semantics being the second most difficult one, and the least was morphology. As for the NNEs evaluators, phonology was the most difficult errors type for them to rate, pragmatics was the second most difficult one, semantics and syntax were the following error types, and the least was morphology. For the NEs evaluators, phonology was the most important component for them when they were rating, semantics was the second most important one, and following on were pragmatics and syntax, and the least important was morphology. As for the NNEs evaluators, semantics was the most important component for them when they were rating, phonology was the second most important one, and following on were pragmatics and syntax, and the least important was morphology. Phonology was an important and difficult factor for the NEs and the NNEs evaluators on comprehensibility. Key words: International Language, Expanding Circle, Comprehensibility, Perception