Feroze Qaiser Kasi                                                                                          10/01/2008

                                             Research Proposal

                          Accented speech and its effect on Intelligibility:

Introduction:

                  Reasons for selecting the topic: Personal interest and experience.

Purpose of the Study:

                   To investigate the effects of an accent on comprehensibility in two different contexts:

1.      Second and Foreign language context in which non-native English speakers learn the language to communicate with native English speakers

2.      International Context in which non-native speakers of different of L1 backgrounds learn the language to communicate with each other.

Research Questions:

RQ.1. To what extent does the accented speech of non-native English speakers affect the comprehensibility of native English listeners?

RQ.2. To what extent does the accented speech of non-native English speakers affect the comprehensibility of non-native English listeners?

Methodology:

* An extensive research will be carried out through Stapleton library and Google search engines.

* A study which will guide this research is “Research in Teaching Pronunciation and Intonation” by Jenkins J. (2004).The bibliographies and references quoted in this study may help me to extend my research.