ABSTRACT
If, as we proposed in chapter 30, pronunciation is the Cinderella of the English language teaching world, then pronunciation testing is the Cinderella of the pronunciation teaching world. That is, it is a very, very neglected area. It is important to remember that what we are discussing here is pronunciation testing, not the testing of wider speaking skills, including oral fl uency and confi dence. As an indication of this, there is a journal entitled Language Testing . In the two decades 1993-2012, it contained 48 articles on the topic of the testing of speaking skills, oral profi ciency, etc. (and many others dealing with tests such as IELTS (International English Language Testing System) and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), that contain speaking sections). In contrast, it contained only fi ve articles on pronunciation testing, and two of them (Holm, Dodd, Stow and Pert, 1999; Theodoros, Murdoch and Horton, 1999) were on the topic of clinical speaking disorders and thus of little relevance here. The other three (Bosker, Pinget, Quené, Sanders and de Jong, 2013; Tan and Mak, 2013; Xi, Higgins, Zechner and Williamson, 2012) were peripherally relevant to pronunciation. Indeed, the 1997 issue of Speak Out! on pronunciation testing contained as many articles on the topic as all other academic journals for 20 years.
