A Corpus of Spontaneous L2 English Speech for Real-situation Speaking Assessment

Abstract

When assessing second language proficiency (L2), evaluation of spontaneous speech performance is crucial. This paper presents a corpus of spontaneous L2 English speech, focusing on the speech performance of B1 and B2 proficiency speakers. Two hundred and sixty university students were recorded during a speaking task as part of a French national certificate in English. This task entailed a 10-minute role-play among 2 or 3 candidates, arguing about a controversial topic, in order to reach a negotiated compromise. Each student’s performance was evaluated by two experts, categorizing them into B2, B1 or below B1 speaking proficiency levels. Automatic diarization, transcription, and alignment at the word level were performed on the recorded conversations, in order to analyse lexical stress realisation in polysyllabic plain words of B1 and B2 proficiency students. Results showed that only 35.4% of the 6,350 targeted words had stress detected on the expected syllable, revealing a common stress shift to the final syllable. Besides a substantial inter-speaker variability (0% to 68.4%), B2 speakers demonstrated a slightly higher stress accuracy (36%) compared to B1 speakers (29.6%). Those with accurate stress placement utilized F0 and intensity to make syllable prominence, while speakers with lower accuracy tended to lengthen words on their last syllables, with minimal changes in other dimensions.

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