Theoretical and Practical Developments in English Speech Assessment, Research, and Training

Veronica G. Sardegna, Ph.D., is Adjunct Faculty at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, USA. For two decades, she has taught a wide range of ESL, English pronunciation, and teacher education courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University. Her research interests are in the areas of English pronunciation and business and academic writing, intercultural learning, and instructional technology. Specifically, she evaluates learning outcomes in these areas by investigating the effects of individual learner variables, strategy use, and technology use (including computer-mediated and learning technology tools) on instructed and autonomous learning contexts. She has published a book (The Practiced Business Writer: An ESL/EFL Handbook, 2009), and numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and prestigious edited collections. Dr. Sardegna is also frequently invited for plenary speeches and expert panels at international conferences, and has been a leader for International TESOL since 2013. In 2021, she received the D. Scott Enright Interest Section Award for her outstanding service to TESOL.Anna Jarosz, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Łódź in Poland, where she conducts research and teaches courses on English phonetics and phonology, practical phonetics, and pronunciation instruction in teacher trainee programs. Her professional interests include pronunciation teaching and learning, phonetics, and second language acquisition with a focus on individual learner differences, motivation, and strategy use among English as a foreign language learners. Dr. Jarosz has recently published a monograph entitled English Pronunciation in L2 Instruction. The Case of Secondary School Learners (Springer, 2019). Since 2019, Dr. Jarosz has been organizing the International Conference on Native and Non-Native Accents (Accents) in Poland.

• The Malleability of Listener Judgments of Second Language Speech.- Evaluations of Foreign Accented Speech: Subjective Bias or Speech Signal Characteristics?.- The Effects of Prestige Model Familiarity on Students’ Perceptions of and Interactions with Diverse English Accents.- Speech Assessment via Read-Alouds: A Critical Analysis of Diagnostic Passages.- Accentedness and Comprehensibility in Non-Native Listeners’ Perception of L2 Speech.- Perception and Recoverability of Modified English L2 Codas.- The Role of Plosive Codas: Recognition and Perception by Lithuanian Learners of English.- Hungarian Learners’ Perception of Intrusive-R in English.- Vowel Accentedness in the Light of Internal and External Competence Assessment.- On the Value of L2 Pronunciation Data for Linguistic Theory: The story of /h/.- Consistency in the Rhoticity of Czech Speakers of English.- High-Variability Phonetic Training under Different Conditions: Individual Differences in Auditory Attention Control.- The Effects of Intensive Phonetic Training on the Acquisition of English Stops.- Learner Views on the Efficiency of L2 Perceptual Training.- Natural Growth Theory of Acquisition (NGTA): Evidence from (Mor)phonotactics.- Perceptual Drift in L1 Phonetic Categories in Multilinguals.- The Study of English Accents: Current Approaches and Future Directions.