| Language assessment has played an increasingly important role in English as a Second Language teaching.During the past decades,scholars have made a great effort in assessing students’ language proficiency in listening,speaking,reading,writing and so on.However,few researches have focused on pronunciation proficiency assessment.Besides,with the publication of the CEFR(2018)and CSE(2018),the focus of pronunciation assessment has shifted from accentedness to intelligibility aiming at the effectiveness of the communication,which urges us to put forward a new rating scale for pronunciation assessment.In this experiment,the author attempts to construct and validate a rating scale for pronunciation under the idea of intelligibility,hoping to make up for the lack of the rating scale of pronunciation assessment under the idea of intelligibility and further instruct the future pronunciation pedagogy.In order to make a model for the future study,the author only applies the rating scale to the question type: passage reading as a pilot study.As for the construction of the rating scale,the author collected and analyzed the text attributes of the rating scale by the following steps: 1)read the literature and current rating scales about the pronunciation assessment;2)invite experts to construct and write the descriptors of the rating scale.Based on the two steps,along with the validation of the rating scale and its modification,the rating scale is displayed in seven dimensions which are vowels,consonants,word stress,sentence stress,sense group and pause,intonation,and fluency and rhythm.To eliminate the central tendency bias,the author uses the 4-point Likert Scale.As for the validation of the rating scale,the author uses MFRM analysis,TAPs and rater interviews for validation.On the whole,the rating scale can well discriminate students’ pronunciation proficiency,and all the raters think it is practical and convenient to use the rating scale.However,raters also point out the descriptors need better modifying to make the scores clearer.The research is a pilot study of the construct and validation of the rating scale of pronunciation,which can facilitate the pronunciation teaching.Since the construct of the rating scale is a dynamic procedure,in the future,the author hopes to modify the rating scale and apply it to other English pronunciation assessment tasks or students of different levels. |
