The assessment of English pronunciation using different frameworks of reference

Salta

Congreso; 45th FAAPI Conference; 2020

Federación Argentina de Asociaciones de Profesores de Inglés

The teaching and assessment of pronunciation has traditionally had the native speaker (NS) as the model of performance (Pennington & Rogerson-Revell, 2019). However, for several decades now, the nativeness principle has been challenged by many linguists (Pennycook, 1995, 2012; Davies, 2003; Ur 2012) given the difficulty, if not impossibility, for any non- native speaker of English (NNS) to achieve such an aim. A new goal for the teaching of English as a second, foreign or additional language has thus emerged in which a fullycompetent speaker ?may or may not originally have been a native speaker? (Ur, 2012). Are pronunciation university professors incorporating these new standards when assessing our students? On this occasion, the results of a study guided by this research question and carried out in the subject Pronunciation Practice at the School of Languages, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, will be presented. The aim is to compare the assessment of English pronunciation under the light of different frameworks of reference which, in turn, are materialized through different assessment methods. Speech samples of students sitting for thefinal exam of the subject Pronunciation Practice were collected, together with the marks the students received after being assessed impressionistically. Two scales were designed on the basis of pronunciation cores deriving from research carried out in contexts in which English is used for international communication: the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) (Jenkins, 2000) and International English Priorities (Crutenden, 2008). These were used by independent judges toassess the same samples. The results seem to indicate that different frameworks yield, as expected, different scores, despite the fact that a passing mark barely differs among the three assessment methods. In the presentation, the rationale behind the study will be developed, together with the theoretical framework on which our research is based. Then, the methodology will be described and the results will be displayed and discussed. Finally, wewill touch upon the implications that different frameworks have in our current teaching practices and what an acceptable threshold for intelligibility could be.