Lappin-Fortin & Rye (2014) investigated the relationship between self-evaluations completed by students and evaluations are done by outside evaluators, or expert raters, in a French pronunciation course. In this study, the researchers focused on general aspects of French pronunciation. They found that there was a significant correlation between the students’ self-evaluations and the experts’ evaluations. Students ranked themselves in a similar way to that of the experts. Additionally, the students’ pronunciation improved over the instructional period. However, this study did not have control and treatment groups, which poses a problem to the pronunciation improvement results, and while having qualitative data in the form of open-ended questions, the researchers did not make use of this data and only presented quantitative results.

Préfontaine (2013) states in her study that, some studies support self-assessment, while others question the validity of self-evaluation methods. She found “a lack of correlation between students’ self-assessments and teacher ratings” (p.329). Préfontaine also states that one of the limitations of her study is the lack of qualitative data. Additionally, Ross (1998), in a meta-analysis of studies investigating self-assessment in L2 learning, asserts that one of the main limitations to self-assessment studies is the lack of qualitative-oriented studies.
This study will contribute to investigating validity and reliability of self-evaluations, in an effort to alleviate these inconclusive results due to lack of theory and methodological dead ends.

Self-evaluations, in this study, targeted two specific features of French pronunciation: segmental /y/ vs /u/ and segmental/suprasegmental “silent e” (or schwa). These two features have been chosen as variables because they are critical to learners’ intelligibility and comprehensibility. Munro & Derwing’s (1995) Intelligibility/ Comprehensibility principle asserts that intelligibility is the extent to which a given utterance is understood by the learner, while comprehensibility is the learners’ perception of how well they understand an utterance.