One of the most common questions we receive from teachers is: "Why did my student get marked wrong for this word? This is how he always says it."

It's an understandable concern, as teachers want their students to get as much credit as possible on their assessments, and they know their students much better than we do. So how do we score these recordings fairly, when we don't know anything about these students at all?

Below are 3 common reasons you may want to "give the student credit" for reading a word in a way that might not 100% match how the word should be pronounced.

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1. Very young students or students with speech differences may still be developmentally working on certain sounds. For example:

• A student who hasn't mastered the /r/ sound might pronounce "bridge" as "blij," "forest" as "foiyest," or "red" as "wed."
• A student working on the /th/ sound might pronounce "the" as "du" or "three" as "free."

There are many other examples of how articulation differences may affect a student's pronunciation. If you can distinguish a speech pattern and suspect that the student is saying the word in the best way they can, you should lean towards marking it as correct.

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2. Students with accents or who are learning English as a second language may also display patterns of pronunciation differences. For example:

• A native Spanish-speaking student may switch the /j/ and /h/ sounds, or the /y/ and /j/ sounds, or they may emphasize a different syllable.
• A native Korean-speaking student may switch the /r/ and /l/ sounds.

Similar to #1, if you hear that a student is pronouncing a word with a clear accent, but in an understandable way, please error on the side of marking it correct.

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3. The last reason you might want to mark a word as read correctly is if it's just really hard to tell. Maybe the audio quality is poor during a section, or the student rushed through a few words. If it sounds to you like the student most likely read the word correctly, please do not mark it as an error.

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For all 3 of these cases, if the student is heard struggling with the word, doesn't know what it is, and then misreads it, then we should certainly mark it as an error. For example, if a student repeatedly pronounces the word "canal" as "kanul," but does not have a noticeable speech difference or accent, you would want to mark this is an error.

Or, if a recording is too short for you to discern a pattern, please transcribe it exactly as you hear it, instead of trying to make a judgment call.

Some cases will be ambiguous, so if you're unsure of what to do, please feel free to reach out at grading@literably.com.

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