Development and Validation of an Automatic Spoken Spanish Test

A computer-based Spoken Spanish Test (SST) was developed to provide an accurate and convenient assessment of speaking and listening for learners of Spanish. The SST is intended to measure a candidate’s receptive familiarity with a variety of forms of Spanish and the candidate’s facility in speaking Spanish. The SST test takes between 15 and 20 minutes to complete, all the items are presented in spoken Spanish, and the test is administered and scored completely automatically. The SST has seven sections, a reading section, a series of elicited imitations, a sentence construction section, two vocabulary sections, a section with opinion questions, and a section with story retelling. The SST items were assembled into tests presented to 579 adult non-native Spanish learners (mostly university students) and to 435 native Spanish speakers. The paper describes validation of the automatic scoring system with reference to concurrent administrations of ACTFL, ILR, and SPT Oral Proficiency Interviews conducted by certified interviewers/raters.