Analysis of Automaticity in Aviation English Oral Exams with a Psycholinguistic Approach

Automaticity is one of the most significant psycholinguistic mechanisms in second language acquisition. Therefore, it was widely studied in language learning/teaching literature. However, far too little attention has been paid to automaticity in language assessment research. This study aimed to analyze the role of automaticity in the assessment of the pronunciation, structure, and fluency skills in an oral Aviation English exam and to shorten the application time of these kinds of exams by testing only the abovementioned 3 language skills with large groups of students. In sum, it was found that using a single task (rerepeating/paraphrasing what you hear) promoting automaticity, is almost as effective as the combination of various complex and time-consuming tasks in assessing pronunciation, structure, and fluency skills.