Student achievement and French sentence repetition test scores

Deryle Lonsdale, Benjamin Millard

Abstract
Sentence repetition (SR) tests are one way of probing a language learner’s oral proficiency. Test-takers listen to a set of carefully engineered sentences of varying complexity one-by-one, and then try to repeat them back as exactly as possible. In this paper we explore how well an SR test that we have developed for French corresponds with the test-taker’s achievement levels, represented by proficiency interview scores and by college class enrollment. We describe how we developed our SR test items using various language resources, and present pertinent facts about the test administration. The responses were scored by humans and also by a specially designed automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine; we sketch both scoring approaches. Results are evaluated in several ways: correlations between human and ASR scores, item response analysis to quantify the relative difficulty of the items, and criterion-referenced analysis setting thresholds of consistency across proficiency levels. We discuss several observations and conclusions prompted by the analyses, and suggestions for future work.
Anthology ID:
L14-1600
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2719–2725
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/770_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Deryle Lonsdale and Benjamin Millard. 2014. Student achievement and French sentence repetition test scores. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 2719–2725, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Student achievement and French sentence repetition test scores (Lonsdale & Millard, LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/770_Paper.pdf
PDF Search