Inteligibilidade do falar inglês do brasileiro: um estudo com ouvintes camaroneses.

Abstract

The worldwide spread of the English language, according to Jenkins (2003), is discussed considering three groups of users: the speakers of English as a Native Language (ENL), the speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL), and the speakers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The absence of studies on intelligibility of the Brazilian way of speaking English involving ESL listeners, as well as the fact of having of a Cameroonian student, speaker of ESL, as an English major at UAL/UFCG led to the present study, which has the following objectives: (1) identify pronunciation aspects that characterize the Brazilian way of speaking English in spontaneous utterances of Brazilian English majors from UFCG; (2) investigate which of these aspect affects the speech of the English majors to two Cameroonian listeners, of which one is familiarized with the Brazilian way of speaking English and the other is not; (3) investigate the influence of the familiarity (or the lack of it) on the intelligibility of the speech of the Brazilians to both listeners who participated in this study. In order to reach our objectives, the concept of intelligibility by Smith and Nelson (1985) was used; variables related to the listener were discussed using Field (2003); the Brazilian way of speaking English was described using Mascherpe (1970), Lessa (1985), Lieff and Nunes (1993) Rebello (1997), Baptista (2001) and Silva (2005); and Atechi (2004) was used so as to describe some aspects of the Cameroonian English. In order to collect data, the undergraduates were audio-recorded talking freely about two topics of their choice. Samples of their utterances, which had pronunciation aspects that characterize the Brazilian way of speaking English, were selected and then introduced to the Cameroonian listeners, who were requested to write what they had heard, and identify the words that they considered hard, very hard, or impossible to understand. Considering the samples that were analyzed, the results showed that word stress was the aspect which hindered the most the utterances of the Brazilian undergraduates to the Cameroonian listeners.