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Pronunciation
Pronunciation comprises phonology and intonation.
- We assess students' phonology on three areas: (a) whether they can articulate individual sounds correctly; (b) whether they can put sounds together into sound "clusters" that are said correctly (e.g, a student may be able to pronounce "sh" and also "d" but finds it very hard to put them together in a sound cluster like that at the end of the word 'finished'); (c) whether they can use these individual sounds and sound clusters together creating words and groups of words that are well-articulated and therefore comprehensible.
- Intonation refers to 'stream of speech', the flow of words with appropriate stress and rise/fall across the sentence(s).
Delivery
In the SBA, 'delivery' is made up of two important sub-aspects:
- Voice projection
In the SBA, students have to make a presentation to a small group, their own class, or another audience. To do this successfully they need to project their voice in order to reach all members of the audience. Teachers are advised to be very conscious of the size of the audience, the size of the room, and the natural strength of the student's voice, and to make sure that the demands of the environment are reasonable for the student. In the group interaction, voice projection is less demanding, but students should also be very aware that they need to speak loudly enough for all the group members to hear them. A student who speaks too quietly is not doing well in the Pronunciation domain.
- Fluency
Fluency refers to the naturalness and the level of intelligibility overall of a person's speech. A student might be considered "fluent in English In a particular situation or on a certain task-type despite an accent or occasional articulation errors.
Note
When scoring the Pronunciation and Delivery domain the teacher has to find a level that best represents both pronunciation and delivery, and this might mean a slight adjustment of one aspect to properly acknowledge a higher (or lower) level of performance in the other.
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