Presentation

Fluency Benchmarks and Impacts of Practice With Instantaneous Assessment on International Teaching Assistants' Speech Rate and Pause Units

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Abstract

This paper reports on the development of academic-specific L2 target benchmarks and introduces a web-based instantaneous assessment tool to provide second language (L2) English learners with quantitative results of their utterance speech rate and pauses. Thirty highly intelligible L2 speakers of English were recorded reading a paragraph aloud and responding to an explanation-based unconstrained speaking prompt to provide benchmarks for learners. Then, six pre-service International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) completed a Moodle course on pause units and speech rate with practice tasks that use the embedded instantaneous assessment tool. Speech captured at a pre- and post-tests was analyzed acoustically and evaluated by six trained human raters for appropriate speech rate, pause units, accentedness, and intelligibility. The results indicate that participants were able to apply the practice to their use of pause units and converge on the target speech rate, and that the changes resulted in trends of increased intelligibility but not accentedness. The paper gives insights into employing automated fluency analysis tools and digital pedagogical content for L2 learners, offers additional evidence of the relationship between suprasegmental features and listener perceptions, and provides support for the use of instantaneous assessment tools with L2 learners.

Keywords: Speech rate, Pauses, ITA, CAPT

How to Cite:

Hirschi, K., Kang, O., Hansen, J., & Looney, S. D. (2023). Fluency benchmarks and impacts of practice with instantaneous assessment on International Teaching Assistants' speech rate and pause units. In R. I. Thomson, T. M. Derwing, J. Levis, & K. Hiebert (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, held June 2022 at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.15711

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