Second Language Pronunciation Assessment ─ Interdisciplinary Perspectives

This book is open access under a CC BY licence. It spans the areas of assessment, second language acquisition (SLA) and pronunciation and examines topical issues and challenges that relate to formal and informal assessments of second language (L2) speech in classroom, research and real-world contexts. It showcases insights from assessing other skills (e.g. listening and writing) and highlights perspectives from research in speech sciences, SLA, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, including lingua franca communication, with concrete implications for pronunciation assessment. This collection will help to establish commonalities across research areas and facilitate greater consensus and agreement about key issues, terminology and best practice in L2 pronunciation research and assessment. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this book will appeal to a mixed audience of researchers, graduate students, teacher educators and exam board staff with varying levels of expertise in pronunciation and assessment and wide-ranging interests in applied linguistics.

Talia Isaacs is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Second Language Speech Lab at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, UK. Her research interests include second language speaking and listening, pronunciation assessment and instruction, raters, rating scales, and machine scoring, and language for specific and academic purposes.

Pavel Trofimovich is Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia University, Canada. His research interests include cognitive aspects of second language processing, second language pronunciation, sociolinguistic aspects of second language acquisition and the teaching of second language pronunciation.