Speech Science Forum 3rd December - Talia Isaacs

Talia's research interests are varied, straddling the areas of language assessment, second language acquisition, higher education, speech sciences, psychology, and medicine. Her work broadly addresses the pressing social-educational challenge of reducing language barriers and improving the oral communication skills of speakers for whom English is a nondominant language to foster their success in workplace and academic settings and promote social integration. A major research strand relates to profiling the linguistic difficulties that most impede the production of comprehensible (clearly understandable) speech in adult learners of English so that these can be targeted in instruction and assessment. Her other research interests include language for specific purposes, automated scoring of speech, and classroom-based assessment. Much of her work is situated in the mixed methods research paradigm. Her primary-authored papers have appeared or are forthcoming in international refereed journals, including Applied Psycholinguistics, Health, Health Communication, International Journal of Inclusive Education, Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, Language Assessment Quarterly, Language Teaching, Language Testing, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and TESOL Quarterly. 

In 2017, she developed and launched the world's first comprehensibility scale with Canadian collaborators. This data-driven tool is designed to help English for Academic purposes teachers more effectively target the most important linguistic factors for understanding international university students' speech. She is co-editor of Second Language Pronunciation Assessment: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2017), the first edited collection dedicated to the topic of pronunciation assessment and Multilingual Matters' first gold open access book. She has a growing track-record of leading test development and validation projects through funded research or consultancy activities for major assessment organisations and regularly serves in an assessment advisory role for different educational stakeholder groups both locally and internationally.  She has served as Chair for the International Language Testing Association Best Article Award, a referee for the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation Best Paper award, and as an evaluator for other academic prizes.