Introduction

The purpose of the present thesis is to study the mutual intelligibility in English of speakers whose native language is Chinese, Dutch or American English. As was explained in Chapter one, the reason for choosing Dutch and Chinese as the source languages was that we wished to compare the role of transfer from a language that is closely related to the target language, English, and one that has no genealogical relationship with English at all. Dutch and Mandarin seem adequate representatives of these two categories. As for the variety of English we target in our research, we decided to work with General American (see Chapter three), rather than British English. American English is the model for English as a Second Language (ESL) in the educational system of the People’s Republic of China. In the Dutch educational system the official norm is British English, but this norm is not strictly adhered to. In the teaching practice at Dutch secondary schools, hardly any attention is paid to matters of pronunciation. Moreover, the type of pronunciation more or less spontaneously adopted by Dutch learners of English resembles American rather than British English. Dutch-accented English, especially when spoken by university students and graduates, is rhotic, with a very strong approximant /r/ in the coda, which is also widespread in the present-day Dutch of the younger generations (see Van Bezooijen, 2005). In a recent study (Van der Haagen, 1998) it was shown that 40 % of the pronunciation variables in the English of Dutch secondary school pupils reflect the American-English pronunciation standard.1 _{Given that Chinese ESL}

speakers adhere to the American pronunciation norm, and that Dutch learners

1 _{It would appear that the language variety spoken in the media sets the norm here. English-}

spoken Dutch television programs and movies in theatres are not dubbed but subtitled. It has been estimated that four times as many programs are broadcast in American English than in British and/or Australian English (Van der Haagen, 1998).

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vacillate between British and American norms, we decided that American English would be the target variety in our study.

A second problem was to decide on the type of learner to be studied. In earlier research (e.g. Bent and Bradlow, 2003; Van Wijngaarden 2001) the choice of speakers was more or less arbitrary or left unmotivated. We know, however, that there are sizeable differences in intelligibility among native speakers, so that the choice of the speakers to be included in our study is not arbitrary. In the type of study we have undertaken, there is no room for large numbers of speakers, so that the one or two speakers per language background that are included in the sample have to be truly representative of their peer group. In this chapter we will describe how we started with groups of 10 male and 10 female speakers from each of three language communities, and then selected one male and one female speaker from each group for inclusion in the final experiment such that these would be optimally representative of the larger group.

The third problem is what level of English proficiency should be adopted in the comparison of speaker and listener groups. Our research is concerned with English learnt as a foreign language, i.e. in a school setting where the language of instruction (and the daily language) is not English but either Dutch (in the Netherlands) or Mandarin (in the People’s Republic of China). We decided to target groups of comparable ESL speakers in each of these two countries. The groups should comprise ESL speakers who need English professionally, and use the language for complex verbal messages, clearly beyond the needs of, say, tourists. However, we explicitly did not want to target specialists in English such as teachers of English as a second language, university students majoring in English language and literature, and the like. We therefore selected as our speaker and listener population the group of advanced students or graduates at the university level, specializing in any academic discipline other than English language and literature. Moreover, speakers and listeners should not have stayed in English-speaking countries for a long period of time, and have had no regular contact with English speaking friends or relatives. Although – presumably – the level of English proficiency will be better for Dutch than for Chinese nationals, the number of teaching hours will be comparable in the two countries. In both systems, English is first taught in the final forms of primary school, and is extended throughout secondary school with an intensity of two to three hours in the weekly curriculum. No further teaching of English is required once Dutch students enter university. In the PR China English skills are also part of the university curriculum of undergraduates. In spite of the possible effects of the diverging educational practice in the two countries, we decided to target non- specialist university students and graduates, since these are the typical professionals who attend international English-spoken meetings and conferences.

In the remainder of this chapter we will, first of all, describe the materials we have collected at the level of meaningless sounds (vowels, consonants, consonant clusters) and at the level of the word, in meaningful as well as in meaningless sentences (§ 4.2). These materials were then recorded from 20 speakers of English (10 male, 10 female) in the Netherlands (with Dutch as the L1), in China (with Mandarin as the L1) as well as from 20 native speakers of American English residing in The Netherlands (§ 4.3-4). The most difficult vowels and consonants were then selected (on the basis of pilot experiments conducted a year earlier) and

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submitted for auditory identification by 20 listeners from the same language background as the speakers. On the basis of percent correctly identified vowels and consonants, one speaker was then selected from each group of ten (male or female; Dutch, Chinese or American background) for inclusion in the final experiment (§ 4.5). The data collection methods for the final experiment are described in § 4.6. No detailed results will be reported in this chapter; these will be presented in Chapters five (vowels), six (consonants), seven (clusters), and eight (words).