Mark Koontz

I have recorded literary passages and dialogues for use as listening and dictation prompts in a number of standardized testing programs. For these projects, the emphasis was on attaining maximal clarity and distinctness of pronunciation. I also had to produce the spoken versions of the texts at several different rates and with several different distributions of pauses, so that I obtained practice in slowing down and speeding up my speech production on command. I took a class on voice overs at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Beyond that class, my training has been entirely of the on-the-job type that I have described above. I hold a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and I have been working in the field of educational testing and measurement for the last fifteen years.