The relationship between multilingual raters’ language background and their perceptions of accentedness and comprehensibility of second language speech

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this case study is twofold: it (1) explores multilingual raters’ judgements regarding the accentedness and comprehensibility of second language speech and (2) examines how the raters’ language backgrounds influence their judgements. In this study, six multilingual Singaporean raters judged the accentedness and comprehensibility of 50 unfamiliar accented speech samples produced by Japanese learners of English with different proficiency levels. In order to investigate rater judgement, the rating scores were subjected to a multifaceted Rasch analysis. A questionnaire and an interview elicited the raters’ retrospective reports on their language backgrounds at three time points in their life (when they were 5, 11, and 21 years old). The results suggested that the raters’ language backgrounds, notably the proficiency balance between multiple languages in early childhood, are related to their rating judgement.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• foreign accent
• speech perception
• rater severity
• second language pronunciation

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the editor of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. We thank all the volunteer participants for the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Natsuko Shintani is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland. Her research interests encompass task-based language teaching, incidental second language acquisition, roles of interaction in second language acquisition, individual learner differences and form-focused instruction for second language writing.

Kazuya Saito is a lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. His research interests include how a combination of form-focused (explicit instruction, corrective feedback) and meaning-oriented (e.g. face-to-face/video-based interaction) instruction can help adult learners develop their second language oral and listening abilities.

Rie Koizumi is an Associate Professor of English in the School of Medicine at Juntendo University, Japan. Her research interests include assessing and modeling second language ability, performance, and development.

Notes

1. A close analysis showed that Rater 3 was stricter in evaluating Task 3 than Task 2; in other words, Rater 3 judged speakers consistently.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research [grant number 26770202], and [grant number 26370737] awarded to the second and third authors respectively.