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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Effect Of Prompt Accent On Elicited Imitation Assessments In English As A Second Language, Jacob Garlin Barrows
The Effect Of Prompt Accent On Elicited Imitation Assessments In English As A Second Language, Jacob Garlin Barrows
Theses and Dissertations
Elicited imitation (EI) assessment has been shown to have value as an inexpensive method for low-stakes tests (Cox & Davies, 2012), but little has been reported on the effect L2 accent has on test-takers' ability to understand and process the test items they hear. Furthermore, no study has investigated the effect of accent on EI test face validity. This study examined how the accent of input audio files affected EI test difficulty as well as test-takers' perceptions of such an effect. To investigate, self-reports of students' exposure to different varieties of English were obtained from a pre-assessment survey. A 63-item …
Combining Elicited Imitation And Fluency Features For Oral Proficiency Measurement, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen
Combining Elicited Imitation And Fluency Features For Oral Proficiency Measurement, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen
Faculty Publications
The automatic grading of oral language tests has been the subject of much research in recent years. Several obstacles lie in the way of achieving this goal. Recent work suggests a testing technique called elicited imitation (EI) that can serve to accurately approximate global oral proficiency. This testing methodology, however, does not incorporate some fundamental aspects of language, such as fluency. Other work has suggested another testing technique, simulated speech (SS), as a supplement or an alternative to EI that can provide automated fluency metrics. In this work, we investigate a combination of fluency features extracted from SS tests and …
Item Development And Scoring For Japanese Oral Proficiency Testing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Hitokazu Matsushita
Item Development And Scoring For Japanese Oral Proficiency Testing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Hitokazu Matsushita
Faculty Publications
This study introduces and evaluates a computerized approach to measuring Japanese L2 oral proficiency. We present a testing and scoring method that uses a type of structured speech called elicited imitation (EI) to evaluate accuracy of speech productions. Several types of language resources and toolkits are required to develop, administer, and score responses to this test. First, we present a corpus-based test item creation method to produce EI items with targeted linguistic features in a principled and efficient manner. Second, we sketch how we are able to bootstrap a small learner speech corpus to generate a significantly large corpus of …
Oral Proficiency Assessment Of French Using An Elicited Imitation Test And Automatic Speech Recognition, Benjamin J. Millard
Oral Proficiency Assessment Of French Using An Elicited Imitation Test And Automatic Speech Recognition, Benjamin J. Millard
Theses and Dissertations
Testing oral proficiency is an important, but often neglected part of the foreign language classroom. Currently accepted methods in testing oral proficiency are timely and expensive. Some work has been done to test and implement new assessment methods, but have focused primarily on English or Spanish (Graham et al. 2008). In this thesis, I demonstrate that the processes established for English and Spanish elicited imitation (EI) testing are relevant to French EI testing. First, I document the development, implementation and evaluation of an EI test to assess French oral proficiency. I also detail the incorporation of the use of automatic …
A Study Of The Correlation Between Working Memory And Second Language Ei Test Scores, Eve Kiyomi Okura
A Study Of The Correlation Between Working Memory And Second Language Ei Test Scores, Eve Kiyomi Okura
Theses and Dissertations
A principal argument against the use of elicited imitation (EI) to measure L2 oral proficiency is that performance does not require linguistic knowledge, but requires only rote memorization. This study addressed the issue by administering two tests to the same group of students studying English as a second language: (1) a working memory test, and (2) an English oral proficiency EI test. Participants came from a range of English language proficiency levels. A Pearson correlation was performed on the test results for each participant. The hypothesis was that English EI scores and working memory scores would not correlate significantly. This …
Automating The Scoring Of Elicited Imitation Tests, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen
Automating The Scoring Of Elicited Imitation Tests, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen
Faculty Publications
This paper explores the role of machine learning in automating the scoring for one kind of spoken language test: elicited imitation (EI). After sketching the background and rationale for EI testing, we give a brief overview of EI test results that we have collected. To date, the administration and scoring of these tests have been done sequentially and the scoring latency has not been critically important; our goal now is to automate the test. We show how this implies the need for an adaptive capability at run time, and motivate the need for machine learning in the creation of this …