Pronunciation is regarded as a valuable subskill in foreign language teaching and testing. Its quality is commonly assessed in a global way by having examinees read aloud. An atomistic test is a more systematic and explicit approach. Such a test would consist of about 40 items, use recorded performances, and draw on an inventory of pronunciation problems to locate error patterns in students' speech. A study of such a test using Dutch learners of French and German as a second language found it to be reliable for these groups. Further research into the validity of this kind of test is needed, since there are factors such as prosody, liveliness, and overall articulation that would figure in a global rating but are not addressed by this rating system. (MSE)