1. A method for evaluating one or more spoken language skills of a speaker, comprising the steps of: identifying one or more temporal locations of interest in a speech passage spoken by a speaker; computing one or more acoustic parameters, wherein the one or more acoustic parameters capture one or more properties of one or more acoustic-phonetic features of the one or more locations of interest; and combining the one or more acoustic parameters with an output of an automatic speech recognizer to modify an output of a spoken language skill evaluation.