AbstractsEducation Research & Administration

Accent variability is an emerging field of study in listening to varieties of English. Mutual intelligibility of accent variations in monolingual, as well as multilingual settings may become challenging for native as well as non-native speakers of English. In a CLT framework this thesis examined the accent variability effect and the expertise reversal effect in listening to native and foreign-accented English with different levels of expertise groups. The three experiments reported in this thesis addressed issues of how accent variability boosted meaningful understanding of listening comprehensions, and how instructional design could aide learning in perceptual listening environments so that learners did not become entangled in the novelty of the accents; at the same time maximising the learning of such instructional procedures.In Experiment 1 three single-accent conditions and six multiple-accent conditions were used. The accents were Australian English, Chinese-accented English and Russian-accented English. These three accents were permuted in six combinations to have the six multiple-accent conditions. The results of Experiment 1 did not support the hypotheses. The low expertise learners did not perform better in single-accent conditions and the high expertise learners did not perform better in multiple-accent conditions. In Experiment 2 Russian-accented English and Australian English were employed. The results partially supported the hypotheses. It was found that the single-accent condition was not easier for the low expertise students whereas the dual-accent condition was easier for the high and very high expertise students. In Experiment 3 the low expertise group listening to Indian-accented English found the accent condition easier than the low expertise group listening to both Indian and Arabic-accented English. The high and very high expertise students learned more listening to Arabic and Indian-accented English than listening to Indian-accented English only. The low expertise individuals were more prone to be challenged by the novelty of the dual-accent conditions. The findings of the experiments were explained in terms of accent variability effect and expertise reversal effect in a CLT framework. Instructional design, as pertaining to this thesis facilitated the naïve, as well as expert English language learners’ abilities in extracting accent-independent global adaptation to English within a CLT framework.