The relationship between interaction, intelligibility, comprehensibility, and speaking confidence among Non-native English speakers

2020 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K13220
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 02080:English linguistics-related
• Research Institution: Niigata University
• Principal Investigator: ONeal George 新潟大学, 教育・学生支援機構, 准教授 (10554256)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2021-03-31
• Keywords: Phonetics / Phonology / ELF / Interaction Hypothesis / SLA

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Because the covid-19 pandemic, the results of this research were actually quite limited. This research proposal required experiments that necessitated putting research subjects in close proximity with each other. Accordingly, for the safety of the research participants, the experiments that were part of this proposal were cancelled in the middle of the experiment. I was not able to gather the sample size that was specified in the original research proposal. I did write up the results of the experiment based on the data that I gathered, but because of the small sample size, the results are somewhat ambiguous and do not support all the hypotheses.

As far as publications, I was only able to publish one peer-reviewed article during the research period. Although other articles are in peer review right now, all in all, I cannot claim to have been able to fulfill the purpose of the original research proposal during the research period. Of course, this is because of the covid-19 pandemic.

Free Research Field

言語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

The goal of this research was to ascertain the extent to which interaction makes pronunciation more intelligible among Japanese speakers of English and other non-native speakers. The tentative results suggest that some activities facilitate intelligibility more than other kinds of activities.