Comprehensibility in Language Assessment

Comprehensibility, or the extent to which a listener understands L2 speakers' spoken output/performance, is a fundamentally important aspect of communication, and a construct the language testing discipline has been interested in for a few decades. Comprehensibility is considered central to successful communication as it highlights the listener's perceptions of the level of difficulty involved in understanding a speaker. Despite the crucial role it plays in communication and the contribution it makes towards the assessment of spoken language ability, comprehensibility has mostly been assessed holistically in language tests, if at all, with little reference to an analytic framework in which comprehensibility can be objectively analysed and reliably assessed. This lack is addressed in this research-oriented and evidence-based monograph which provides an analytic framework for understanding, defining and assessing comprehensibility. The authors argue that conceptualising comprehensibility as a multidimensional construct and adopting a broader perspective to understanding and analysing it for communication purposes would benefit the fields of second language assessment and second language acquisition.