The present study examined how native English speakers in Canada assessed the degree of foreign accent in nonnative speech when they were required to focus on the content of an utterance. The native English listeners were asked to listen to English sentences produced by speakers of Japanese, Mandarin, and Tamil, and to rate their foreign accent on a 9-point scale in two different rating tasks. ...

The current study aimed at examining the relationship between English language teachers’ assessment literacy and their teaching experience. In other words, it intended to inspect the relationship between native and non-native English language teachers’ assessment literacy and their teaching experience. To achieve such goals, 100 native and non-native English teachers from ESL and EFL contexts w...

The availability of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) Discourse Treebank has spurred substantial research into discourse analysis of written texts; however, limited research has been conducted to date on RST annotation and parsing of spoken language, in particular, nonnative spontaneous speech. Considering that the measurement of discourse coherence is typically a key metric in human scorin...

In the field of speech recognition, attempts have been made to develop an automatic evaluation system for spoken language of second language (L2) learners. The models adopted in the previous studies are a multiple regression model where naturalness of speech is estimated by differences from the speech of the native speakers in the timing characteristics of overall sentence, individual content a...

Text-to-speech (TTS) voices, which vary in their apparent native language and dialect, are increasingly widespread. In this paper, we test how speakers perceive align toward TTS voices that represent American, British, Indian dialects of English the extent social attitudes shape patterns convergence divergence. We also whether top-down knowledge talker, manipulated as a “human” or “device” guis...

The objective of this research is to detect effective factors in English pronunciation teaching from the viewpoint of EIL (English as an International Language). This research is based on the data of the Successful Pronunciation Learners (SPL) selected by the raters, Japanese and native speakers of English (NSE), in Tominaga (2005). On the grounds that the aim of teaching English to Japanese st...

The unprecedented growth of English and arrival of English as an International Language (EIL) has generated a new fledged argument about English language teachers’ role and status around the world. To date, much of the debate on the native/non-native distinction in EIL settings and factors contributing to sharpen distinctions has remained unsettled. This gap motivated this study on the English ...

The application of Multifaceted Rasch Measurement (MFRM) in rating test takers’ oral language proficiency has been investigated in some previous studies (e.g., Winke, Gass, & Myford, 2012). However, little research so far has ever documented the effect of test takers’ genders on their oral performances and few studies have investigated the relationship between the impact of raters’ gender on th...