As reflected in the concept of Global Englishes, English mediates global communication, where English speakers represent not merely those from English-speaking countries like United Kingdom or United States but also global people from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds, who speak the language with diverse accents. Thus, to communicate internationally, cultivating a maximized listening proficiency for and positive attitudes toward global Englishes speakers with diverse accents is ever more important. However, with their preference for American English and its popular culture, it is uncertain whether Swedish youth learners are developing these key linguistic qualities to be prepared for the globalized use of English. To address this, we randomly assigned 160 upper secondary students (mean age = 17.25) into six groups, where each group listened to one of six English speakers. The six speakers first languages were Mandarin, Russian/Ukrainian, Tamil, Lusoga/Luganda, American English, and British English. Through comparing the six student groups, we examined their listener intelligibility (actual understanding), listener comprehensibility (feeling of ease or difficulty), accentedness perception (perceiving an accent as native or foreign), and accentedness acceptance (showing a positive or negative attitude toward an accent) of diverse English accents. The results showed that the intelligibility scores and perception/attitude ratings of participants favored the two speakers with privileged accents–the American and British speakers. However, across all six groups, no correlation was detected between their actual understanding of the speakers and their perception/attitude ratings, which often had a strong correlation with their feelings of ease/difficulty regarding the speakers accents. Taken together, our results suggest that the current English education needs innovation to be more aligned with the national syllabus that promotes a global perspective. That is, students need to be guided to improve their actual understanding and sense of familiarity with Global English speakers besides the native accents that they prefer. Moreover, innovative pedagogical work should be undertaken to change Swedish youths’ perceptions and attitudes and prepare them to become open-minded toward diverse English speakers.

Our previous study examined the mutual intelligibility of Malaysian English to Swedish listeners and Swedish English to Malaysian listeners. The results showed that Swedish listeners did not understand the Malaysian speaker well. In the present study, the Malaysian speaker was trained to alter her realization of the word stress, consonant clusters and long vowels in a way that previous research has found intelligible for both native and non-native English speakers. The audible and measurable alteration significantly increased the intelligibility of the speaker for Swedish listeners. This indicates that the three phonetic features are important for intelligibility in international contexts and suggests including the word stress in the Lingua Franca Phonetic Core. Moreover, we discuss that Malaysian English being a dialect and Swedish English being a similect may be relevant to their mutual intelligibility and relate the discussion to teaching English pronunciation in countries where English has been localized.

In teaching and assessing pronunciation of English as an international lingua franca (ELF), intelligibility is more relevant than nativelikeness (Jenkins, 2015). As guidelines for intelligible ELF pronunciation, the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) syllabus (Jenkins, 2002) and relative functional load (FL) of phonemic contrasts (e.g., Catford, 1987) have been used (e.g., Jeong et al., 2018; Rahimi & Ruzrokh, 2016; Sewell, 2017).The paper examines phonemic details in the LFC and relative FL, based on the intelligibility of second language speakers’ phoneme realisation for Swedish university students. Using the perception of a group of Swedish youths for the study can be rationalised that they are known to have very high proficient English skills as a second language (Norrby, 2015). Speech data with IPA transcriptions were from the Speech Accent Archive (http://accent.gmu.edu/index.php), comprising nine speakers’ readings of the same text, whose first languages were Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Somali, Thai, Turkish and Urdu respectively. Each of seventy-five Swedish students taking university courses chose and transcribed one of the nine speakers in English orthography. Through comparing errors in the listeners’ transcriptions, their accounts, and the speakers’ segmental features deviating from either American or British English phoneme inventory, we firstly analysed whether, and to what extent such deviation affected intelligibility. From this analysis, some details of the LFC and relative FL were questioned. For example, while the LFC denotes that all consonants besides interdental fricatives need to be realised as in Standard American/British English, replacing some consonants with others, like plural marking /z/ with /s/ or alveolar /ɹ/ with uvular / ʁ/, did not compromise intelligibility. Likewise, while the ɔ/oʊ contrast is known to have high FL, replacing one with the other did not cause misunderstanding (e.g. realising ‘only’ as [ɔnli]). The findings suggest further scrutinising and developing the LFC and relative FL.

The study examaines changes in a native Malaysian’s pronunciation of word stress, vowel length and consonant clusters before and after she was tranined. Jeong & Thorén (under review) showed that this training made the speaker’s pronunciation more intelligible to native Swedish listeners. We look at the changes on an acoustic level by measuring vowel duration, word duration, f0 patterns and realization of consonant clusters. The result shows that, after training, her pronunciation improved in all the three aspects. The improvement was audible as well as measurable with acoustical changes in absolute and relative vowel duration and realization of consonant clusters. Word stress patterns were also improved but with less clear-cut acoustic correlates.

The study examines the intelligibility of a German speaker's replacement of the initial interdental /θ/ with the alveolar fricative [s] in words that occurred in her reading of a short English text. Twenty nine students in university English courses in Sweden listened to, and transcribed the whole reading, where substituting theinitial /θ/ of a word with [s]appeared four times. The result shows that the phoneme substitution by the German speaker did not cause misunderstanding in three instances, but it considerably misled the listeners' understanding of a phrase in one occasion. We discuss this finding in relation to the functional load of the initial θ/scontrast (Catford, 1987), and Jenkins' (2002, 2015) Lingua Franca Core syllabus.

Wherever migration or travelling takes place, people need to learn new languages. This learning entails a variety of interlanguages. Irrespective of whether you are a learner or a teacher of a language, you need to decide how to allocate time and effort for learning and teaching into developing different sub-skills of the language. Four skills are considered in second language teaching and learning; listening, reading, speaking and writing. Proficiency in speaking requires sub-competences, such as pragmatic competence, fluency or making a clear pronunciation. Even having each of these sub-competences for speaking require having sub-skills. For example, to have a "good" pronunciation, one needs to well realise segmental features: phonemes, phonotactics, assimilations, and prosodic features: rhythm and intonation. Most of the time, young children learning their first language (L1) as well as additional languages (L2's) acquire these pronunciation skills without formal training and often reach a native-like speech also in additional languages. By contrast, adult learners of an additional language seldom reach nativelikeness in their pronunciation of the language. However, ideally, they still can achieve a fluent, intelligible and well-received pronunciation of the language. The present paper is concerned with the pronunciation of Swedish as an additional language, in particular, three phonemic prosodic contrasts, namely stress contrast, quantity contrast and tonal word accent contrast. We attempt to find out, among these three prosodic contrasts, which is more crucial than the others for making one's speech intelligible. That is, if the second language learner cannot acquire all of them perfectly, which of them should be given more priority in learning and teaching Swedish pronunciation? We also want to study whether or not a pronunciation lacking one or two of these contrasts can still be well understood.