AUTOMATIC ASSESSMENT OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY OF NON-NATIVE CHILDREN
Table 1: Evaluation of L2 linguistic competences in Trentino in 2018: level, grade, age and number of pupils participating in the English (ENG) and German (GER) tests.
['CEFR', 'Grade, School', 'Age', '#Pupils', '#ENG', '#GER']
In Trentino (Northern Italy), a series of campaigns is underway for testing linguistic competencies of multilingual Italian students taking proficiency tests in English and German. A set of three evaluation campaigns were planned, taking place in 2016, 2017/2018, and 2020. Each one involves about 3000 students (ages 9-16), belonging to 4 different school grade levels, and three proficiency levels (A1, A2, B1). The 2017/2018 campaign was split into a group of 500 students in 2017, and 2500 students in 2018. Several tests aimed at assessing the language learning capabilities of the students were carried out by means of multiple-choice questions, which can be evaluated automatically. However, a detailed linguistic evaluation cannot be performed without allowing the students to express themselves in both written sentences and spoken utterances, which typically require the intervention of human experts to be scored. In this paper we will focus only on the spoken part of these proficiency tests.