Mondigrini i englesko-srpska međujezička percepcija

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the peculiarities of interlanguage perception of Serbian L2 students of English at the Faculty of Philology and Arts, University of Kragujevac. The goal was likewise to analyze the triggers for potential mondegreens. Mondegreens represent deliberately or accidentally misheard expressions or song lyrics that obtained new meanings. The research consisted of three main tasks for testing students’ perception: a multiple choice test, fill-in-the-gap test and perception of ambiguous expressions. The results generally showed poor level of perception of English song lyrics by Serbian students of English, mainly due to the lack of consistent perception and production training. The results demonstrated significant statistical differences across tasks which meant that the type of activity influenced the overall outcomes. Understandably, perception accuracy was satisfactory in the first task with multiple choice answers, whereas the fill-in-the-gap task proved the most difficult. The findings of the paper go in line with the previous studies listing phonological ambiguity, faulty accent distribution, matching of syllable and word boundaries, specific features of connected speech as well as individual sounds as the most frequent triggers for mondegreens. The results of the paper raised questions about the reliability of traditional testing techniques in ELT such as whole-text dictation.