Rater judgment and English language speaking proficiency

Abstract

The paper investigates whether there is a shared perception of speaking proficiency among raters from different English speaking countries. More specifically, this study examines whether there is a significant difference among English language learning (ELL) teachers, residing in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the USA when rating speech samples of international English language students. Teachers were asked to rate samples from international students who took the test of spoken English (TSE), the oral component of TOEFL. Building on previous research which has demonstrated that different tasks and rater groups affect results obtained from learner performance on oral tests, this project inves..