Research Information System
Hacettepe Egitim Dergisi, vol.36, no.4, pp.928-940, 2021 (SCI-Expanded)
© 2021, Hacettepe University. All rights reserved.The purpose of this study was to investigate the comprehensibility of Turkish native speakers in spoken English. To this end, 16 preservice English teachers enrolled in the English Language Teaching (ELT) programs of two state universities provided speech stimuli on three speaker tasks: read aloud, picture description and responding to a real-life situation. The recordings collected were presented to eight listeners with various first language backgrounds via a nine-point likert-type scale in order to find out about their perceived degree of ease or difficulty in understanding. Listeners were also requested to explain what made it easy or difficult to understand each task. The findings of the study revealed that listeners experienced considerable difficulty in understanding Turkish speakers of English. As for the factors that impacted their comprehension of the speech samples, five main themes emerged which were understanding speech, speaking rate and fluency, foreign accent, incorrect pronunciation and specific pronunciation errors. In addition to the main themes, three sub-themes were identified for the theme of pronunciation errors, namely vowel and consonant errors, pause, intonation and stress errors, and mispronounced words. The implications of the study are two-fold. Aimed at an increased level of comprehensibility, it could be helpful to provide learners with additional opportunities for spoken production in EFL/ESL classes. In ELT programs, revisions in pronunciation course descriptors and syllabuses with the inclusion of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and foreign accent are highly recommended.