Systems and methods are provided for scoring non-native, spontaneous speech. A spontaneous speech sample is received, where the sample is of spontaneous speech spoken by a non-native speaker. Automatic speech recognition is performed on the sample using an automatic speech recognition system to generate a transcript of the sample, where a speech recognizer metric is determined by the automatic speech recognition system. A word accuracy rate estimate is determined for the transcript of the sample generated by the automatic speech recognition system based on the speech recognizer metric. The spontaneous speech sample is scored using a preferred scoring model when the word accuracy rate estimate satisfies a threshold, and the spontaneous speech sample is scored using an alternate scoring model when the word accuracy rate estimate fails to satisfy the threshold.