This thesis explores how intelligible Czech accented English is to foreign speakers and what pronunciation issues Czech learners of English have. With English language becoming the world’s lingua...Show moreThis thesis explores how intelligible Czech accented English is to foreign speakers and what pronunciation issues Czech learners of English have. With English language becoming the world’s lingua franca, there has been a significant change in the attitude towards English pronunciation teaching over the years. This paper introduces the change from the Nativeness Principle, that focused on sounding native-like, to the Intelligibility Principle, the goal of which is to have a clear pronunciation enough to converse comfortably with other speakers of English. This paper’s focus is particularly on the Czech accented English and its understandability in conversation. Mutual intelligibility is what Jenkins (2000; 2002) aimed at when putting together a list of core pronunciation features one should focus on when learning English. This Lingua Franca Core (LFC), as she named it, serves as a base for this paper. In this study, recordings of less advanced Czech learners of English were collected and analysed, in order to pinpoint the main pronunciation mistakes. These were compared to Jenkins’ LFC to establish how intelligible the Czech accent is. Selected bits of the recordings were also sent to responders through a survey, to find out what their opinion on the Czech accent is. The main findings of the analysis showed that less advanced Czech learners substitute English vowels with Czech ones, they put stress on the first syllable in every word and pronounce English weak vowel forms as full ones. They also struggle with the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless dental fricatives, and they insert a glottal stop in between words, creating clear boundaries. The survey results showed that these aspects of Czech English mainly constitute a problem in isolated words. When context is provided, the Czech accent proved to be quite intelligible and some of the pronunciation features even helped with intelligibility. The study concluded with pronunciation tips for English learners.Show less
This thesis examines spoken academic L2 English. It looks at the spoken language of Dutch university lecturers in their L2 English spoken lectures, against the background of the...Show moreThis thesis examines spoken academic L2 English. It looks at the spoken language of Dutch university lecturers in their L2 English spoken lectures, against the background of the internationalisation of higher education, high ambitions of Dutch universities, and the emergence of the English language as the common academic spoken language, the quality of which receives criticism and is under-researched. The study focuses on the differences in linguistic richness between the L1 Dutch spoken language and the L2 English spoken language of nine Dutch university lecturers, lecturing in the Humanities and in the Social Sciences. Three methods are applied: a corpus analysis focused on the linguistic variety of the L2 English lecture language compared to the linguistic variety of the L1 Dutch lecture language, interviews with the participating lecturers aimed at complementing the corpus analysis data, and an expert analysis focused on the non-L1 English features of the L2 English spoken lecture language. Both quantitative and qualitative data are presented. Special attention is paid to the adjectives and the verbs used, i.e., their variety, frequency of usage, sophistication, and correct or incorrect usage specifically in the L2 English lecture language. The study shows the linguistic complexities of studying L2 English academic lecture language. In the epilogue it is argued that L2 English academic lecture language deserves more attention.Show less
