Teachers' assessment of perceived foreign accent and comprehensibility in adolescent EFL oral production in Study Abroad and Formal Instruction contexts: A mixed-method study

Research on second language acquisition has long been interested in analyzing dif-
ferent learning contexts that language learners experience when trying to improve
their target languages (Collentine & Freed 2004) such as formal instruction (FI),
study abroad (SA), and, more recently, different types of immersion (Pérez-Vidal
2017). The aim of the present study is to examine two of these contexts, SA and FI
at home, in the case of English as a foreign language adolescent learners having
Catalan and Spanish as their first languages, an age band which has received com-
paratively less attention than others (but see Llanes 2012; Llanes & Muñoz 2013).
We focus on the learners’ foreign accent and comprehensibility, as judged by a
group of non-native listeners, with the objective of assessing progress and the re-
lationship between both dimensions, following Trofimovich & Isaacs (2012). Most
centrally, we are interested in analyzing the aspects of each speech dimension of
focus which have reportedly affected the judges’ ratings. In order to do that, speech samples were collected longitudinally for the SA (N = 25) and the FI (N = 31) groups
of learners, respectively, with a pre-test/post-test design. Listeners were asked to
rate and report on the aspects which affected their ratings. Our results reveal that
the aspect which most influenced the judges was pronunciation. This places pro-
nunciation at the center of the search for better practices in instructed second lan-
guage acquisition in line with recently published studies (Van Loon 2002; Darcy
et al. 2012; Gordon & Darcy 2012; Saito & Lyster 2012; Grant 2014).