Pronunciation is regarded as a valuable subskill in foreign language teaching and testing. Its quality is commonly assessed in a global way by having testees read aloud. A more systematic and explicit approach to evaluation is proposed. The reliability of this so‐called “atomistic” approach is compared with the reliability of a traditional “holistic” procedure.Generalizability theory was applied in order to comprise all relevant factors in one psychometric model. Decision studies were carried out to counter the effects of the number of raters and te