Intelligibility has been widely regarded as an appropriate
goal for second language pronunciation teaching. Yet there is no universally
accepted definition of intelligibility, nor any field-wide consensus on the
best way to measure it. Further, there is little empirical evidence to suggest
which pronunciation features are crucial for intelligibility to guide teachers in
their instructional choices. This mixed-methods study examines whether
intelligibility is an appropriate criterion for assessing pronunciation proficiency
in the academic domain. Speech samples of eight non-native English
speaking graduate students were elicited using the Test of Spoken English,
a standardized test often used to screen international teaching assistants
(ITAs). Results of a fine-grained analysis of the speech samples combined
with intelligibility ratings of 18 undergraduate science students suggest that
intelligibility, though an adequate assessment criterion, is a necessary but
not a sufficient condition for international graduate students to instruct
undergraduate courses as teaching assistants. |