Article 5 English Speech Assessment? Why Bother?

How important is assessment for  successful acquisition of clear American English (AE) speaking?  If we didn’t care about efficiency of learning, not important at all.   Your money is worth a lot, but your time is worth even more.  Important is determining  nonnative-born individuals’ pronunciation for the 23 (some count 25) consonants and the 14 AE vowels (some count more), their knowledge of pronunciation rules and their current manner of talking.  Easy to recognize is that in all spoken languages there are  consonants and vowels which are pronounced the same as American English, others that are different.  If the instructor (teacher, coach, tutor) and the student-learner know the errors for AE speech sounds and pronunciation rules, then instruction and learning can put disproportionate and more time to acquiring the AE pronunciation for errors and deficient skills with more efficiency and less time.  “Thus, you know what to fix and what doesn’t need fixing.”  Also, we also know what is the appropriate Level of Course for each person.

Critical is to assess or test all of the AE speech sounds, the most important pronunciation rules and the manner of talking  Critical also is to assess or determine sources of the speech errors, including underlying physical differences, such as vocal strengt, range speech volume or loudness, and vocal flexibility.

We use the term  “English speech communication and intelligibility.”   Other terms used for decades include “Accent Reduction” or “Accent Modification”  or English Pronunciation.  What is “accent”?  It is a pattern of speaking.  Twenty-three languages of the roughly 7,000 languages in the world’s 196 countries are spoken by more than half of the world’s population, according to Ethnologue and The Intrepid Guide, 2022.  Also there are a multitude of Englishes. The 2018  CIA World Factbook  “Field Listing-Languages” reported that  58 sovereign states and 28 non-sovereign entities use English as their official language.

Fact is, many nonnative-born speakers of English or persons who have English as a Second Language (ESL), or English as an Other Language (ESOL) are using the pronunciation of consonants and vowels from their  mother-tongue  (the language they started speaking at about age one to four and beyond).   Even if the individual is from a country where English is the official language, the pronunciation and other physiological characteristics of speech are not the same as American English speech.

For example, a prevalent and frequent  difference in the  pronunciation of consonants and vowels in other languages compared to American English is the duration of the speech sound.  Specifically 70% of AE speech consonant and vowel sounds are double in duration of time (“slow”) compared to the quick or short in duration consonants and vowels.  Other languages frequently speak the same consonants and vowels in a quicker or shortened duration compared to American English.  For instance, prevalent is nonnative speakers pronouncing V, TH, M or N  much more quickly than American English speech.  Or the first language could make the speech sound more lengthy or slower.  For example, in Spanish, the consonant sound CH is pronounced slowly, like the AE speech sound SH.

Not only that, the general stiffness or tension of the speech articulator muscles  or the force of contraction (especially tongue, lips, jaw and muscles in the throat attached to the vocal folds) is a recognized feature of speech production (Gracco, 1994).   Based on the articulatory acoustics (the “sound characteristics” of consonants and vowels) our observations and reports from nonnative speakers,  American English has differences  compared to other languages for speech articulator muscle tension and force of contractions  in addition to critical differences for position of the tongue, lips, teeth and jaw.  Muscular features can be inferred from an oral assessment  of speech that tests all of the consonants and vowels in American English and uses sentences designed to control for coarticulation effects. 

Task Dynamic Model of Speech Production focuses on the dynamics of human speech in that speech production, including clear English speech production, is a coordinated action (Kelso and Tuller, 1984,  Saltzman et al, 2010, Parrell, B. et al 2018).  Specifically, American English and clear American English speech are examples of  manner or mode or style of speaking. The Central Nervous System (CNS) and especially the brain, dictates in a complex way the stiffness or tension of the muscles, the force of the muscles, the activation of motor neuron units and slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers,  the duration of the speech sounds, and the coordination with the voicing at the vocal folds in the larynx of the throat.  For more detail see Article 3 “Task Dynamic Model of Speech Production” – link here.

Initial diagnostic assessment tells the student-learner and the instructor/teacher/coach what to focus on for efficient acquisition of clear American English speech.  We’ll come back to more on this later.

To circle back — 90 sovereign and non-sovereign entities have English as their official language,  includjng India, Australia, Nigeria, Great Britain.  British English matches most frequently American English pronunciation except for notably the American English short vowel A, short vowel O, and consonant R.  For the other Englishes, there are multiple differences for duration of the consonants and vowels, the movement or the articulators (tongue, teeth, lips and jaw), and  the volume or loudness of consonants especially at the ends of words or syllables.  These differences put together are called “accented English.”  Put simply, the more heavily the English is accented or the more differences in the speech production features compared to American English, the more difficult it is for native-born American persons and other internationally born speakers to understand the nonnative-born speaker.  That’s called intelligibility (understandability).

Back to the topic of “Why bother with oral speech assessments? ” Vitally important are mid-course assessments to determine the change in pronunciation of all of the AE consonants and vowels, skill for pronunciation rules and patterns,  and manner of talking.  Is there an improvement  in AE intelligibility (understandability)?  Which AE speech sounds have improved and which sounds have not.  Is the instruction and practice working for the individual like it works for most people?  Thus at 3 weeks and 6 weeks of the 10 week instruction course, we do another assessment using an equivalent phonetically balanced test (10 different assessment tests).  Thus, the instruction and home practice/direct practice and focus on deliberate practice in daily life (taking every opportunity to deliver clear American English) can be modified.   Since on average it takes  70 days of practice everyday to change a habit (Frothingham, 2019) –in this case from accented English to clear American English speech– the end of the course assessment (10 weeks of coached instruction), is essential to determine intelligibility change.  Assessment, especially after 10 weeks, is critical to measuring efficacy or success of the course and the methodology, and measuring speech changes which accompany specific changes in instruction.

As a sidebar,  our initial diagnostic assessment also includes determining intelligibility of the student-learner when talking with background noise.  That’s because  all humans, especially  those in professional roles that call for extended speaking such as teachers/professora, supervisors, ministry, tech people in collaboration, leaders, etc. need to be understood in large rooms or where there is background noise.

Sidebar number two-  our initial diagnostic assessment includes a segment where we do a brief     (about 25 minutes)  training of the student-learner of the Six Clear Talk Strategies used by American English talkers when they want to be easily understood.  Also the brief training includes critical enunciation instruction for clear American English, such as where to position or place the tongue for particular consonants and which AE speech sounds are quick and which have lengthier durations in time.  Then we assess the student-learner on a different equivalent phonetically balanced test to determine how well they learn the strategies with added enunciation instruction.   That information tells us a great deal about student-learners: How well do they learn from auditory instruction?  How do they respond to the (dynamic) task of speak clearly using these strategies with the added enunciation training for American English.   This gives us a leg-up or advantage to making the instruction for the coached course for each individual   even more efficient.

And the initial diagnostic assessment answers the question of prognosis for the student-learner for the methodology of Clear Talk Mastery. In other words, with that brief training, did the student-learner measure better on the intelligibility test after the brief training compared to before the training?  What speech sounds improved, and what are the likely sources or reasons for  speech sounds and intelligibility not improving for American English after the training?

To circle back to the initial question, how important is assessment for successful acquisition of clear American English?  Our answer — scientifically based English speech assessment is critical  for several reasons.   Most importantly, initial diagnostic assessment and mid-course assessments make for more efficient learning.  Crucial for our instruction is also long-lasting learning – more about that later.  Post course assessment  examines the  efficacy or success of the learning in our clear American English speech training program.   It goes without saying that to determine success or efficacy requires comparison to skills and assessment before the instruction- the initial diagnostic assessment. The key question for post course assessment  is “Does the Clear Talk Mastery program work or not?”  and what are the successes and failures. That’s part of our Action Research—keep doing what works and change what doesn’t work  (after you have tested it on a multiple people, not just one person!).  Training and instruction improvement is one goal.  Discovering what to change or keep for efficient and long-lasting American English, — that’s the other target for assessment.  Can instruction and learning get better with using assessments and Action Research?  We bet our life and work on that.

copyright Clear Talk Mastery, Inc 2023 Antonia L. Johnson