Methods

The data in this investigation come from real high-stakes technical speech from content courses, i.e. non-language-teaching contexts, which is a strength of the present study. Another strength is the fact that group-work as a genre has been included in the investigation along with the lectures. Such highly interactive speech events are quite rich in terms of examples of usage and therefore reveal considerable data that are not necessarily observable in other speech events.

The group-work sessions and lectures have been digitally recorded and have all been analyzed for the present project. The data have been recorded straight into the computer through Audacity (version 1.2.4), a free cross-platform audio editor that runs on Mac OS X, Windows and GNU/Linux.

The subjects come from twenty different first language backgrounds: 50% of the students were exchange students from different countries, 25% were Swedish and another 25% were ethnically non-Swedish, i.e. residents in Sweden who have another home language than Swedish. When it comes to lecturers, 54% were Swedish and 46%, speakers of other languages. It is worth noting that none of the foreign languages in the material dominated over another one. Altogether, 63 speakers were recorded.

For the investigation of the material, all the occurrences of non-native-like usage in the lectures and group-work sessions were identified and transcribed. Cases of nonnative-like usage were grouped as ‘disturbing’, i.e. causing overt comprehension problems and ‘non-disturbing’, i.e. causing no comprehension problems. An important stage of the study has been to investigate listener attitudes towards the non-standard forms through interviews and questionnaires, using slightly accented non-native speaker speech.