The effects of pause in English speaking evaluation

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of utterance internal pause in English speaking evaluation. To avoid possible confusion with other errors caused by segmental and prosodic inaccuracy, stem utterances with two different length obtained from a native speaker were manipulated to make a set of stimuli tokens through insertion of pauses whose length and position vary. After a total of 90 participants classified into three proficiency groups rated the stimuli, the scored data set was statistically analyzed in terms of the mixed effects model. It was confirmed that predictors such as pause length, pause position and utterance length significantly influence raters' evaluation scores. Especially, a dominating effect was found in such a way that raters gradually deducted scores in accordance with the increase of pause duration. In another experiment, a tree-based statistical learning technique was utilized to check which of the significant predictors played a more influential role than others. The findings in this paper are expected to be practically informative for both the test takers who are preparing for an English speaking test and the raters who desire to develop more objective rubric of speaking evaluation.

Evaluation of English speaking proficiency under fixed speech rate: Focusing on utterances produced by Korean child learners of English*

“…This study also suggests pitch contour lines regarding intonational characteristics such as declination and boundary tones contribute to proficiency judgment. The advanced group could be distinguished from low-level group through the number of inserted pauses, as many other studies have suggested (Bosker et al, 2013;Kang et al, 2010;Kim, 2017).…”