Assessing Pronunciation in an EFL Context: Teachers’ Orientations towards Nativeness and Intelligibility

Abstract

This study investigated EFL teachers’ orientations toward the assessment of pronunciation at the upper-secondary school level in Norway. Data were gathered from purposeful samples of 24 interview informants and 46 questionnaire respondents. The teachers were asked about their attitudes toward the assessment of nativeness and intelligibility, including pronunciation features such as segmentals, word stress, sentence stress, and intonation. The results showed that the teachers strongly agreed on the importance of intelligibility, whereas they strongly disagreed on the salience of nativeness. They were also moderately to strongly oriented toward the evaluation of segmentals, word stress, and sentence stress. For intonation, the results suggest that the teachers were either less concerned with this criterion or unsure of how to relate to it. The study points to the importance of a more clearly defined pronunciation construct in language assessment, which should be informed by recent advances in pronunciation research.