Issues of Comprehensibility and Intelligibility in Oral Expression: Case study of first-year secondary school students’ speech exchanges

Abstract

The case study in hand targets the oral expression skill in the Algerian context which is the secondary school. In the light of new thematic and methodological reforms on teaching and learning English as a foreign language, and if we take into account the extended use of this language outside the classroom range, issues of comprehensibility and intelligibility in speech exchanges become an important concern. Speech with such criteria is to be fostered by teachers to move from teaching comprehension to enabling expression. Therefore, the aim of this work of research is to shed light on the factors that lead first-year secondary school learners to be comprehensible and intelligible in oral expression. It also attempts at helping teachers enable their learners achieve comprehensibility and intelligibility in a non-native context. We start with the assumption that these factors are the linguistic and nonlinguistic language knowledge, the verbal and non-verbal communication strategies, personality and then socio-cultural factors.