Oral language testing at tay nguyen university  (Page 9/53)

1. Static relationships

Describing an object or photograph

Instructing someone to draw a diagram

Instructing someone how to assemble a piece of equipment

Describing/instructing how a number of objects are to be arranged

Giving route directions

1. Dynamic relationships

Story-telling

Giving an eye-witness account

1. Abstract relationships

Opinion-expressing

Justifying a course of actions

(Brown&Yule, 1983, p.109)

The difficulty of tasks additionally depends upon the number of relationships, elements, factors or characters within each task. For instance, ‘a short narrative involving a single character and only two or three events may be easier than a lengthy description covering many details and relationships’.

Linguistic KnowledgeSociocultural KnowledgeCooperative PrincipleProduction/Interpretation of Spoken LanguageFurthermore, how to ensure their production of spoken language in a new language to be appropriately interpreted is extremely demanding on the part of speakers/learners. In order to achieve this confidence, learners must first process their acquired knowledge of language and then produce utterances linguistically acceptable and socioculturally appropriate, and the utterances must conform to the cooperative principle (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain, 2000, p.168-171). This principle refers to the general rules of how to maintain the exchange flow between interlocutors, which means that ‘the speaker wants to be understood and interpreted correctly and the hearer wants to be an effective decoder of the messages he receives’. A speaker’s ideas successfully communicated are illustrated in figure 2.3 below.

Figure 2.3: Success of Meaning Negotiation

Linguistic knowledge, or Organizational knowledge (Bachman and Palmer, 1996; and Bachman, 1990), includes grammatical knowledge (ie. knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and phonology/graphology), and textual knowledge (ie. rules of cohesion and coherence, and knowledge of rhetorical organisations). Sociocultural knowledge, or Pragmatic knowledge (Bachman and Palmer, 1996; and Bachman, 1990), is associated with ‘(1) characteristics of the individuals who take part in the communicative exchange, (2) features of the situation in which this exchange takes place, (3) the goal of the exchange, and (4) features of the communicative medium through which the exchange is carried out.

The assessment of learners’/students’ production of spoken language or their oral test performance is entirely based on the two major features of spoken language - interactional and transactional functions, and production length. Therefore, the criteria for assessment must be formed and founded on the basis of these two features, and these criteria vary according to learners’ language proficiency level or the difficulty of test tasks. In particular, the criteria for assessing learners’ interactional and transactional short turns are to focus more on learners’ or test takers’ communicative reaction and successfully negotiated ideas rather than on content, size, cohesion or coherence like in taking transactional long turns.