Een Alternatieve Methode van Uitspraakbeoordeling

Pronunciation is generally regarded as an important subskill in FLT. Its quality is usually assessed by impression marking the reading aloud of a piece of text or a number of spontaneous utterances. The drawbacks of this method, however, are its lack of transparency (what exactly is being tested?) and its suscepti-bility to subjectivity.To avoid these drawbacks Cito has developed an alternative method for the assessment of pronunciation: as the student reads a piece of text, the teacher assesses one aspect of pronunciation for each line (8 or 9 words) the student reads. A fair number of such minor decisions (about 40) yield a pretty good insight into a student's pronunciation.The reliability of this atomistic method of assessment was sub-mitted to practical tests and compared with that of traditional assessment procedures. Further research compared the validity of the atomistic method with that of the impression marking procedures involving reading aloud and spontaneous speaking.It is concluded that the atomistic assessment method has three major advantages: a high correlation between various raters in assessing pronunciation; it functions not only as a summative, but also as a diagnostic tool; irrelevant factors that play a role in traditional assessment procedures are largely excluded.