Assessing progress in pronunciation can be very challenging. How can teachers tell if a student is progressing with his or her pronunciation? Celce-Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin (2010) believe that the teacher needs to provide ongoing informal feedback on individual progress to support each learner during instruction. They consider this to be a key issue in the teaching of pronunciation. In addition, many prominent practitioners (Acton, 1984; Miller, 2001) believe that students should be involved in evaluating their own progress. Should pronunciation instructors use and integrate this knowledge to test and track pronunciation progress?

One of the challenges we face in assisting students with their pronunciation is helping them “see” the progress they are making. This can be a daunting task because speech is typically an auditory task and it is difficult to provide a visual representation of auditory information. If we can find ways to do this, students will have concrete visual methods for measuring their pronunciation progress and success.

MULTIPLE METHODS

It seems crucial to integrate the underlying pronunciation principles of the research above into our tracking methods to make them more efficient and effective. To create a solid foundation, we must attempt to utilize students’ self-monitoring and teachers’ continuous feedback for successfully tracking student progress in pronunciation. Some effective and efficient methods of tracking pronunciation progress utilize a variety of formats: written, oral, audio, recordings, software, and other technology.

We need to assess students’ current levels to create a baseline of their pronunciation and to help them construct a clear vision to achieve their personal goals. It is important to keep in mind both expressive (their ability to actually say the words or use pronunciation features) and receptive (their ability to understand the different features and discriminate between them) speaking skills.

DIAGNOSTIC DECISIONS: EXPRESSIVE AND RECEPTIVE PRONUNCIATION

Looking at students’ ability to produce speech, we need to make numerous decisions and consider different speaking styles that can be used. Practices that have been used for assessment and tracking include imitative, prearranged, spontaneous, and self-monitored speech. Each of these practices has its own inherent pros and cons.

Examples of Styles

Imitation. The student imitates the examiner’s speech. This produces results that focus more on the ability of the student to correctly repeat a given stimuli than the typical speech productions they use independently.

Prearranged. The student is examined and prompted on a specific and possibly limited corpus of tasks. This may be a reading task in which spelling can influence pronunciation or create a narrow testing scope.

Spontaneous. The student is assessed based on more natural and unplanned speaking tasks. This may not lead to all the target sounds being produced and may not provide a comprehensive enough picture.

Self-Monitored. The student completes speaking tasks in which he or she can engage in self-analysis before the task is completed or submitted. Students may make changes to their speech sample before the examiner has an opportunity to observe the typical patterns they are using.

We also need to decide if we utilize assessment tools that specifically look at just sounds/phonemes, words, sentences, or connected speech, or a combination of all of these.

The pronunciation teacher can create a profile for each student based on assessment results. This profile may include a visual representation of the student’s skills in concrete terms (test scores or numbers) for the selected receptive pronunciation features. In addition, it may list specific sounds/phonemes that a student had difficulty with during the assessment.  An overall test score can be compared to the total possible score. This will help students actually see their starting points by comparing the numbers of their pronunciation performance to the total possible number they could achieve. Consider including the following components: consonant production, consonant discrimination, vowel production, vowel discrimination, syllables, word stress, sentence stress, focus words, thought groups, connected speech, and intonation.

MEASURING “TALKING” SUCCESS

Measuring a student’s progress is not easy. Nevertheless, if students acknowledge some of their strengths and choose specific targets to work on, it will help create a visual representation of their individual goals and establish a starting point to track their success.

The pronunciation teacher can consider whether or not the pronunciation textbook he or she is using has an assessment piece that accompanies it, such as Clear Speech by Judy B. Gilbert (2007) or Targeting Pronunciation by Sue Miller (2008).

Teachers can also create their own pronunciation profile forms to go along with these assessments. These forms should integrate both receptive and expressive pronunciation components, along with the ability to retest and write the scores or information two times after the initial baseline testing, creating pre- and posttest capability. This will yield valuable data regardless of the length of time students participate in pronunciation classes. It is important to have the students choose their own goals or target areas after reviewing the results on their profiles because they have to work toward achieving these goals and it is in the teachers’ best interest that they be highly motivated.

SELF-RECORDINGS

In addition to seeing the progress by looking at pronunciation scores as we test and retest, we should also utilize the auditory component. This can be achieved by having students record samples of their speech in the first week of class before they start learning the specific pronunciation techniques, and recording again in the last week to compare the samples. The difference is often remarkable. Sometimes more time is needed to hear a marked difference; still, it is useful to utilize this technique as one of the many methods of tracking students’ progress.

Depending on the language level of the student, it is important to consider the levels of complexity of the recording tasks (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Recording Tasks’ Complexity

 
Teachers can share instructions with students on how they can record themselves speaking using any of the following: personal computers, language lab computers, campus PCs, smartphones, iPhones, tablets, and iPads. Most computers have a sound recorder feature or students can download a free voice recording program such as Audacity.com. After they record their sample, they can save it as an MP3 or wav file and attach it to an e-mail to their instructor or upload it to Blackboard.

TRACKING METHODS

Methods used to track pronunciation progress include Blackboard and software tracking, phone and computer recordings, pre/posttests, and pronunciation logbooks.

One way of tracking students’ pronunciation progress is Blackboard. The instructor can provide specific Internet sites for the students to practice their targets with links and descriptions for students on Blackboard. I provide five to six sites. Each time they practice on a site, the teacher is able to secretly track them and see how often they are practicing and even which sites they are practicing on most frequently. In Figure 2 you can see that the students accessed the external links for practicing with pronunciation sites 279 times during this 4-week time period.

Figure 2. General Blackboard Tracking

The teacher can access the Blackboard tracking information by clicking on Control Panel>Course Statistics>Select Report: Accesses by Content Area>Time Period: your choice>Users: select all users.

Teachers can track the number of times each student individually practices on each site by looking at the external links column. In Figure 3, on the left you will see the student’s initials and by following that row horizontally to “external links” you can identify and track how many times that student practiced. Note that the student with initials D.A. practiced 80 times and the student with initials L.S. didn’t practice at all. Teachers can also access charts that show the specific time of day and days of the week the student practiced, as well as sites used by each student.

Figure 3. Blackboard Tracking of Individual Students

When students are not progressing and we can see that they have not practiced, we have evidence to show them why they might not be progressing. We may want to recognize and positively reinforce the individual students who are practicing. For example, I have posted announcements on Blackboard congratulating those participating students for their hard work and practice. It can make a significant difference.

SOFTWARE TRACKING

Another method of tracking that can be utilized is pronunciation software with tracking features. Many different kinds are available. At our IEP, we have American Speechsounds software in our language lab. With this program, students track themselves by writing down results in a log during class or during additional practice times while practicing specific pronunciation exercises. They can also record their own voices and compare themselves to the speech models using the important principle of self-monitoring.

PRONUNCIATION LOGBOOK TRACKING

Some pronunciation textbooks, such as Sound Concepts by Marnie Reed and Christina Michaud (2005), include pronunciation logs so that students can track their errors based on teacher feedback. Writing it down helps both students and instructors see if there are any patterns as to the type of error or frequency of error. As students begin to analyze their individual and unique pronunciation patterns, they can begin to make changes. This kind of insight or self-awareness seems to apply to many skills we learn in life. For example, during class practice, one student may notice that the teacher’s feedback focused on that student’s difficulty using the /r/ sounds at the right time and the /l/ sound was often used instead. Another student may learn that he or she unintentionally adds vowels in places that they don’t exist (epenthesis) like saying “bulue” instead of “blue,” and yet another student may gain awareness that he or she deletes final consonants while speaking. A pronunciation logbook can help each student by providing detailed specific teacher feedback about his or her pronunciation and also aid in the process of self-analysis. This allows students to see if there is a pronunciation pattern of types and frequency used when they speak. My students use this log as well as other logs that I have created that emphasize specific pronunciation features such as stress, focus words, thought groups, and American style intonation.

SHARING RESULTS

Results need to be shared to be effective. For students to “see” progress accurately after testing, the results need to be collective. Along with individual detailed profiles, we can create general class profiles to share. This allows students to compare their performance to an average (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Fall 2010, Intermediate Pronunciation, Class Averages

Pronunciation Test (Total Possible = 100 points)

August                      December

65.8% correct         82.5% correct

Implementing all these effective methods of tracking in teaching contexts can help students succeed in learning pronunciation. Which methods will you use to successfully track your students’ pronunciation progress?

RESOURCES: TEXTBOOKS FOR CLASSROOMS

Miller, S. F. (2007). Targeting Pronunciation: Communicating Clearly in English (2nd ed.). Thomson Place, Boston, MA: Heinle.

Gilbert, J. B. (2008). Clear speech: Pronunciation and listening comprehension in North American English. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Reed, M., and Michaud, C. (2005). Sound Concepts: An Integrated Pronunciation Course. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

REFERENCES

Acton, W. (1984). Changing fossilized pronunciation. TESOL Quarterly, 18(1), 71-85.

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Goodwin, J. (2010). Teaching Pronunciation: A Course Book and Reference Guide (2^nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Miller, S. (2001). Self-monitoring, self-help, and the route to intelligible speech. The CATESOL Journal, 13(1), 173-182.

Catherine Moore M.A.CCC-SLP is honored to be a faculty member for the American Language Program at California State University, Fullerton. She is a licensed Speech Pathologist with a Certification in Clinical Competence awarded by the American Speech Language Hearing Association. Catherine has presented internationally in Cambodia as a People to People Ambassador and most recently was invited to speak in Sao Paulo, Brazil.