Abstract
The chapter addresses one of the controversial issues in second language pronunciation assessment: why raters give different ratings even if the scoring procedure is valid and the criteria are consistent. The research aimed at tackling the question with the help of neuroaesthetic methodology. The Vienna Integrated Model of top-down and bottom-up processes in Art Perception allows the experimental ratings to be analysed from the rater’s perspective and the speech sample to be compared with an art object as far as its evaluation is concerned. The experimental material consisted of a student’s speech sample, which was a part of a vast annotated data set (collected over a four-year teaching period), the student's pronunciation ratings and a pilot survey of various raters with their assessment strategies. The results of the academic assessment of the student’s phonetic performance and the analysis of the survey answers correlated well with the neuroaesthetic model. The correlation covered the main processing elements: (1) pre-classification; (2) perceptual analysis; (3) implicit memory integration; (4) explicit classification; (5) cognitive mastery; (6) secondary control and (7) self-awareness, metacognitive assessment.
What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about things
Epictetus (Cited from Geary 2005: 73)
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I take a broad view of second language, i.e. encompassing the language of natural and artificial bilingualism.
- 2.
We do not touch on the notion of accentedness in this paper.
- 3.
Hereafter we will use ‘course’ for “A Practical Course in Phonetics”.
- 4.
“A Practical Course in Phonetics” has a syllabus that has been approved by the programme’s administration.
- 5.
EP stands for the student’s first name and a surname in our data storage.
- 6.
Unlike the visual system, where visual objects and scenes are frequently stationary, the hallmark of the auditory system is time (Gage and Baars 1978: 144).
- 7.
There is a table of convergence of percent into marks in our department. It runs like this: 51–69% is a satisfactory mark, 70–84% is good, and 85–100% is excellent.
- 8.
The respondents listened to EP’s speech for the second question and the third question, where they could refer to the audio 3 times to evaluate vowels, consonants and prosody.
- 9.
The respondent is GV. Hereafter the respondent’s text is fully preserved.
- 10.
With respect to the corresponding question number, see Table 13.4.
- 11.
In our case in phonetics that would be the English speech of a native speaker.
- 12.
About the corresponding question number, see Table 13.4.
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Acknowledgements
I express a sincere gratitude to my colleagues Dr. Galina Vishnevskaya, Dr. Tatiana Dubrovskaya and Prof. Maria Lukanina for their thoughtful comments on the initial version of the chapter. I stay responsible for any remaining drawbacks.
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Sukhova, N.V. (2021). Phonetics as an Art: Real or Surreal Assessment Criteria?. In: Sukhova, N.V., Dubrovskaya, T., Lobina, Y.A. (eds) Multimodality, Digitalization and Cognitivity in Communication and Pedagogy. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84071-6_13
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