Exploring English for academic purposes instructors’ perceptions of speech fluency through developing and piloting a rating scale for a paired conversational task
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much research has explored how perceptions of speech fluency are influenced by a variety of temporal speech features (e.g. speech rate). However, less is known about the influence of non-temporal and conversational speech characteristics on fluency perceptions. To address this gap, this study explored English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructors' perceptions of speech fluency through developing and piloting a rating scale for a paired conversational task for assessment for learning purposes. A two-phase mixed-methods sequential exploratory design (Creswell, 2009) was used. Seven trained EAP instructors watched videos of seven-minute conversations, elicited from 14 intermediate-to-advanced EAP learners. Afterwards, instructors were audio-recorded discussing their observations about learners' fluency. These recordings were transcribed and coded using in-vivo and pattern coding techniques (Saldaña, 2009). Six themes were identified: efficiency, smoothness, sophistication, clarity, facilitating topics and turns, and supporting the conversation partner. These themes informed the development of a multi-item fluency rating scale. 35 EAP instructors then used the scale to rate eight learners’ speeches. To investigate the construct-relevance of these scale items, a principal component analysis was conducted, producing two components - individual fluency and conversational fluency. Pedagogical activities aligned with the scale are provided.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it