A study on evaluating English speech rate: Focusing on professional vs. non-professional raters

Linguistic Research 36(Special Edition), 59-80. This study is designed to find out what speeds professional evaluators give the best scores to on speaking assessments and how their speed-related assessment differs from non-expert evaluators. The test tokens are designed to avoid the experimental complications that have normally appeared in previous studies of relevance. The test materials recorded by a trained native speaker with 8 different speed ranges are free of distortion caused by computer manipulation, and they exclude other factors affecting rating results as much as possible. Three different groups of eight each participated (8 native English raters and 8 Korean raters who had official evaluation experience on an English-speaking test as professional raters, and 8 general Korean student-raters with high English proficiency as non-professional raters), with 24 raters in total, and the results show that the range of the speaking rate that draws the highest score is between 4.43 and 4.50 syl/sec on average. The assessment of extremely fast speed ranges varied slightly among the three rater groups but all three groups showed a similar tendency. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)