Article

L2 Learners’ Self-Assessment of Comprehensibility and Accentedness: Over/Under-Estimation, Effects of Rating Peers, and Attention to Speech Features

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Abstract

Comprehensibility and accentedness of L2 speech are often assessed through native listeners’ ratings, but there is little research on learners’ speech self-assessments. This study investigates the extent to which learners’ self-assessment matched native listeners’ evaluations and whether their self-assessments were influenced by having previously assessed the performance of peers. In addition, we asked learners to identify the speech features they related to comprehensibility and accentedness when self-assessing their speech. Advanced L2 English learners (N=56) performed a picture-description oral narrative task,which they then self-assessed for comprehensibility and accentedness under two conditions: having previously evaluated 20 speech samples of peers (N=24) or not (N=32). Native English listeners (N=14) assessed the 56 learners’ narratives for the same dimensions. Results indicated that learners self-assessed their speech inaccurately for comprehensibility and accentedness, by either overestimating or underestimating their own speech, in accordance with previous research on comprehensibility (Trofimovich et al., 2016). Nevertheless, previous rating experience did not lead to more accurate self-assessments of comprehensibility and accentedness, suggesting that extended practice in the assessment of comprehensibility may be necessary for learners to be able to calibrate their speech self-assessments. When assessing their speech for comprehensibility, learners reported paying attention to pronunciation and the story plot rather than grammar or fluency, whereas for accentedness they focused on segmentals and overall accent rather than suprasegmentals.

How to Cite: Ortega, M., Mora, J. C., & Mora-Plaza, I. (2022). L2 learners' self-assessment of comprehensibility and accentedness: Over/under-estimation, effects of rating peers, and attention to speech features. In J. Levis & A. Guskaroska (eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, held June 2021 virtually at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.13354.