Avaliação de inteligibilidade, compreensibilidade e grau de sotaque estrangeiro do inglês-L2 de alunos brasileiros do 6º e 9º anos do ensino fundamental em sistema bilíngue de ensino

Abstract

In this qualitative-quantitative study, we aimed to examine the oral dimensions in English of two groups of elementary school students (6th and 9th grade) from a bilingual project located in the city of Fortaleza, specifically the dimensions of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness (Munro; Derwing, 1995). Two groups of participants were selected: 8 from the 6th grade and 9 from the 9th grade, who performed two semi-spontaneous production tasks recorded in audio, namely: a) reading sentences; and b) describing an image. The audio recordings were evaluated by a panel of judges composed of four native English speakers residing in England. Additionally, both speakers and listeners answered questionnaires about their experiences with the language. The quantitative results showed that the 9th-grade students achieved a higher intelligibility threshold than the 6th-grade students for both tasks; comprehensibility was not directly correlated with the grade level; and the degree of foreign accent was higher for the 6th-grade students. Qualitatively, the most common errors found in both tasks were the use of prepositions, syntactic structure, and pronunciation of specific phonemes, reaffirming the assumptions regarding the individual behaviors of the language subsystems (Lima Jr., 2016).