Oral language testing at tay nguyen university

I am also grateful for the permission to attend this master course given by the leaders of Tay Nguyen University, and especially to the staff members of the English Section for their assistance and participation in the research project.

Glossary

This glossary is intended to give working definitions of terms used frequently in this thesis in order to help readers understand the author’s intended meaning.

Communicative stress this term means the difficulty degree of a task that a speaker has to carry out. this difficulty refers to all the conditions under which the speaker is put to perform the task.

Elicitation technique An elicitation technique involves the procedure of performing a task that inferences of a speaker’s language ability are based on.

Interactional function This term refers to one of the two functions of spoken language. A speaker producing an interactional instance of spoken language wants to make the interaction atmosphere pleasant.

Level scale or rating scaleA level or rating scale used in this thesis is a document displaying classified levels of learners’ language knowledge and what learners can do at each level.

Long turna long turn is a string of utterances that a speaker produces

Oral test type A type of oral test refers to the way a test task requires test takers to do.

Short turnA short turn is speech of one or two utterances that a speaker produces.

Test administration Test administration involves the delivery of a set of test tasks to a group of test takers under specified conditions.

Test designTest design in this thesis refers to the production of a principled statement as a basis for writing actual tests and administering them.

Test developmentTest development is the entire process of creating and using a test. It involves test design, test operationalization and test administration.

Test operationalizationTest operationalization is the production process of actual tests. It involves developing test task specifications and test structure.

Test structure Test structure refers to the number of test tasks included in a test

Test task specificationsTest task specifications tell in detail what a test is designed to measure and how it will be tested

Transactional functionThis term refers to one of the two functions of spoken language. A speaker producing a transactional instance of spoken language means to convey his intentions and messages.

Abstract

Assessment of oral language proficiency at Tay Nguyen University (TNU), where the author of this thesis works, has been claimed to be extremely problematic. This thesis takes a critical look at the reality of oral English language testing at this institution to point out its strengths and weaknesses and the cause(s) of the existing drawbacks or problems.

In order to achieve this, a study was carried out to evaluate TNU current practices and TNU staff’s perceptions of oral language testing. The methods employed in the study include: (1) an detailed analysis of the current oral test development process based on Bachman&Palmer’s theoretical framework for test development, and (2) a survey on how well the staff know about oral skill assessment.