Pronunciation in EMI: the impact of instruction on the comprehensibility and foreign accent of a lecturer

Abstract

[EN] The increasingly fast spread of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in tertiary education has become notorious over the last decades. Nevertheless, doubts and concerns on lecturers’ proficiency level and L2 pronunciation have also arisen with this rapid expansion. Arguments of insufficient support to boost the communication skills which these practitioners need in the classroom have been made. The present study aimed at exploring whether EMI lecturers’ classroom speech can benefit from specific linguistic support. It inspected the effects of a customized pronunciation session for an EMI lecturer, whose classroom pronunciation was recorded before and after the custom session. The potential intervention effects were tested for pronunciation, via two groups of judges who listened and rated 30 excerpts using Likert scales for comprehensibility and foreign accent measures. The two groups chosen differed in English nativeness, one being English native speakers living in the United Kingdom and the other group being Spanish undergraduate English Studies students. The results of this case study revealed that both groups found the post-test easier to understand (increased comprehensibility), however, the lecturer’s foreign accent was not judged to be reduced after the pronunciation session. These results seem to suggest that supporting actions can help these professionals in the plurilingual context they are working, in a communicative speech dimension such as pronunciation. Interesting results emerged from the comparison of the judgements given by the two groups of listeners. While both groups aligned in the identification of the post-test as more comprehensible, the non-native listeners tended to notice more comprehensibility and lower accentedness than the English native speakers, supporting the L1 intelligibility benefit, which indicates that comprehensibility among speakers who share a first language is higher. Finally, it was also found that the native speakers were able to make more distinct assessments for comprehensibility and foreign accent. This could be indicative of the fact that they may be attending to different features for each construct as previous literature has indicated.