A speech production experiment was conducted to investigate how well native Japanese speakers can produce a non-contrastive sound in American English, namely, intervocalic alveolar flaps, and how their production varies as a function of language experience. Native Japanese speakers who have prior experience living in the US produced English sentences containing potentially flappable segments. R...

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinesespeaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary assessment, two practice reading comprehension passages...

This work reports on the construction of a rated database of spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) learners of English. Spontaneous speech was collected from 28 L2 speakers representing six language backgrounds and five different proficiency levels. Speech was elicited using formats similar to that of the TOEFL iBT and the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test. ...

This paper presents the first version of the SpeechRater system for automatically scoring non-native spontaneous high-entropy speech in the context of an online practice test for prospective takers of the Test of English as a Foreign Language internet-based test (TOEFL iBT). The system consists of a speech recognizer trained on non-native English speech data, a feature computation module, using...

Conventionally, the questions on a test are assumed to be kept secret from test takers until the test. However, for tests that are taken on a large scale, particularly asynchronously, this is very hard to achieve. For example, example TOEFL iBT and driver’s license test questions are easily found online. This also appears likely to become an issue for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In thi...

Good language learners slot in a repertoire of strategies and when language tests are at stake, test-taking strategies and test-wiseness pave pay to a prolific outcome. Among such tests, TOEFL iBT seems to be a prerequisite to academic success and a nightmare many Iranian students struggle with. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to raise awareness about the type of questions in iBT, b...