Ari Huhta

Ari Huhta is a Professor of Language Assessment at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He specialises in assessment that supports language learning such as diagnostic testing. Most of his research has focused on reading and writing but earlier he was involved in designing several rating scales for speaking and recently he has also participated in two projects on the rating of L2 speaking. One of these projects involved also automated speaking recognition and automated assessment of L2 speaking.

Abstract

Fluency and pronunciation in language assessment: How do language testers define them and what do raters pay attention to?

The presentation discusses how pronunciation and fluency have been defined in the assessment of foreign or second language (L2). Since assessment can have a considerable washback on learning and teaching, it useful to look at how major language tests and examinations view these two key aspects of speaking and is known about how raters assess them. The talk is based on two kinds of analyses. The first involves a systematic analysis of practical language assessment instruments such as rating scales used by human raters; these provide us with the operational definitions of fluency and pronunciation that raters should pay attention to in their assessments. The analysis produces an overview of which features of pronunciation and fluency are included in the rating scales often vs rarely. The second type of analysis focuses on what research has found raters to actually focus on when they rate L2 learners’ fluency and pronunciation. A summary is also given of the features that automated speaking assessment systems consider when evaluating L2 speech and how those compare with the features assessed by human raters. Furthermore, the presentation reports on the findings of two recent Finnish studies that investigated fluency and pronunciation. One of them investigated, e.g., the recognition of the examinees’ first language by the raters and its effects on their ratings, while the other developed automated speech recognition and evaluation system for L2 Finnish and L2 Swedish.

The analysis of fluency is based (with some updates) on the chapter Fluency in Language Assessment by Huhta, Kallio, Ohranen and Ullakonoja in the book Fluency in L2 Learning and Use by Lintunen, Mutta and Peltonen (Multilingua Matters, 2019). A similar analysis of pronunciation in L2 speaking assessment was conducted for the purpose of this talk.