Comprehensibility in Language Assessment - A Broader Perspective - Parvaneh Tavakoli

Comprehensibility in Language Assessment - A Broader Perspective - Parvaneh Tavakoli

Comprehensibility at a Phonological Level

Comprehensibility in Language Assessment - A Broader Perspective - Parvaneh Tavakoli

Parvaneh Tavakoli [+-]
University of Reading
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Parvaneh Tavakoli is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading. Parvaneh's main research interest lies in the interface of second language acquisition, language teaching, and language testing. Parvaneh has led several international research projects investigating the effects of task and task design on performance, acquisition, assessment and policy in different contexts. Her research has been published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and books.
Sheryl Cooke [+-]
British Council
Sheryl Cooke is an Assessment Researcher with the British Council Assessment Research Group. Sheryl has 20 years’ experience in various areas of language assessment and her qualifications include an MA Language Testing (Lancaster University) and an MA Linguistics (SOAS). She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), focusing on the assessment of spoken English and the potential implications for English as a Lingua Franca. Her research interests include assessment of speaking, the use of new technologies in language testing and the ethics of language assessment in the global context.

Description

This chapter focuses on the more traditional scope of the comprehensibility/intelligibility construct and takes an analytical approach to examining evidence related to phonemic and prosodic linguistic components affecting comprehensibility of spoken language. An overview of the features that have been identified by previous studies is presented and categorised (e.g. Isaacs & Harding, 2017; Isaacs & Trofimovich, 2012), including those occurring at phoneme level (articulation), word level (segmental units, word stress) and sentence level (intonation, pitch, fluency). The features are then examined from three key perspectives: a) reported impact on comprehensibility b) how the features are reflected in rating scales c) whether the features are L1-dependent

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Citation

Tavakoli, Parvaneh; Cooke, Sheryl. Comprehensibility at a Phonological Level. Comprehensibility in Language Assessment - A Broader Perspective. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 22-52 Feb 2024. ISBN 9781800504332. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=41098. Date accessed: 21 Nov 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.41098. Feb 2024

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