Resumen de Effects of benchmarking and peer-assessment on French learners' self-assessments of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency
Sara Kennedy, Juliane Bertrand, Aki Tsunemoto, Josée Blanchet, Pavel Trofimovich
This study examined the effect of benchmarking and peer-assessment activities on second language (L2) French learners' self-assessments of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency. The learners, who included 25 L2 French students enrolled in a 15-week university-level French course, recorded two oral presentations at the beginning and the end of the course and self-assessed their accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency four times. In addition to regular course instruction, the treatment group also engaged in benchmarking (discussing and applying pre-established evaluation criteria) and peer-assessment (evaluating peers' speaking performances). The students' self-assessments were compared with ratings of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency by 10 native-speaking French raters. At the end of the course (i.e., for the second oral presentation), the treatment group showed greater alignment in self-assessment of comprehensibility than the comparison group, relative to the external raters' assessments. Results highlight the value of assessment-focused activities targeting L2 learners' awareness of pronunciation.
