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A Report on the Inclusion of Diverse Speakers on the LSAT Listening Comprehension Assessment : A Survey of the Literature with Recommendations

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) is a nonprofit corporation whose members are more than 200 law schools in the United States and Canada. It was founded in 1947 to coordinate, facilitate, and enhance the law school admission process. The organization also provides programs and services related to legal education. All law schools approved by the American Bar Association (ABA) are LSAC members. Canadian law schools recognized by a provincial or territorial law society or government agency are also included in the voting membership of the Council. This study is published and distributed by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC). The opinions and conclusions contained in these reports are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Law School Admission Council. The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) has been developing a listening comprehension assessment for possible inclusion in the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Since the stimuli for the test questions are actually spoken by professional readers, it will be important to determine dialect parameters for the readers whose speech will be recorded for use in the test. This study was undertaken to evaluate LSAC's preliminary plan to include speakers who are identifiably African American and Hispanic in the listening comprehension assessment. The inclusion of such speakers will reflect the diversity of the LSAT population and will be an extension of cultural inclusion or sensitivity markers found in other parts of the LSAT. This report provides the background in sociolinguistic research on dialects of American English that is necessary for understanding the use and implications of including diverse voices in an assessment of listening comprehension in the LSAT. The focus is on two of the most readily identifiable social dialects of American English: African American Vernacular English and Hispanic English, including Chicano English. The speakers proposed for recording the LSAT listening comprehension test would be bidialectal, native speakers of English reading Standard English in a formal setting. As a result, the basis for the ethnic identification of the speakers would be subtle, involving only the occasional sociolinguistic marker. Further, since the speakers would be reading from scripts with a fixed syntax and vocabulary, the ethnicity of these speakers would be identifiable exclusively through phonological markers. The report thus focuses on the phonetic, phonological, and prosodic features of African American Vernacular English and Hispanic English. The report describes the relationship between the various dialects …