The 2011 ICAO Rated Speech Sample Training Aid (RSSTA) was developed under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation English Association (ICAEA) by a panel of international academic, linguistic, testing and operational experts. Analysis of the data was carried out by specialists in language testing from the universities of Lancaster, Melbourne and Cambridge.

ICAO issued the first RSSTA in CD ROM format in 2006. As part of its ongoing commitment to improve standards in aviation English, ICAO commissioned ICAEA to produce a second RSSTA in 2010. Its purpose is to help aviation language test service providers, examiners, teachers and also training, human resources and operational management to understand what constitutes an acceptable level of English for pilots and air traffic control officers. Unlike the original training aid which was distributed on CD ROM, this set of speech samples is available online, free of charge, through the ICAO website.

75 raters from 23 countries engaged in the rating exercises. The raters, from both operational and language backgrounds, assessed over 210 samples of language from a range of tasks representative of the materials that are currently available in the testing of aviation English. The data from the rating exercises was subjected to a many-facet Rasch analysis (FACETS, Linacre 2002) to identify samples which provide internationally agreed, reliable indications of each candidate's performance in the six criteria of the ICAO rating scale. Rating work continues; more samples will be added to the RSSTA over time.

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