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Die Brücke zwischen Sprachstandsdiagnostik und Deutschförderung im UF Psychologie/Philosophie
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The test-retest reliability of the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised
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Assessing EFL speaking skills in Vietnamese tertiary education
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Abstract:
Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) ; English language mastery plays a crucial role in global communication, trading, and cultural exchange. Vietnam has set English as a strategic goal of the national education system for boosting the process of regional and international integration. Vietnamese education has been making a great effort to enhance the effectiveness of English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction with a focus on communicative competence, particularly listening and speaking skills. My study aimed to examine the operational practices of oral assessment as an inseparable component in relation to L2 teaching and learning in Vietnam. Participants in my study project were EFL majors (candidates) and teachers (examiners) involved in testing English speaking skills at three universities in South Vietnam. My data collection for this empirical research started in late 2015 and continued to early 2016. Data sources included oral test observation, questionnaire surveys, interviews, testing documents, test scores, and EFL content experts’ judgements. The results highlight a methodological diversity in oral assessment across the institutions in terms of test administration, task design, language content, the process of rating, and the impact of testing speaking. Test scores served more to complete a required unit of study rather than to make reliable inferences about learners’ oral production ability and provide useful feedback for future improvement. Interview tasks did not reflect characteristics of natural conversations when the interlocutor (also examiner) played a predominant role in the assessment context. Several oral test questions required candidates’ theoretical knowledge in order to be answered. These factors had the potential to increase students’ test anxiety and hindered their best performance. Discussion tasks enabled a wide variety of speech functions to be produced and provided opportunities to manage verbal interaction between paired candidates. Interactive speaking revealed students’ weaknesses in a co-constructed oral performance, and a tendency for individual turn-taking to talk about the assigned topic. My study suggests implications for various stakeholders who could assist to improve the quality of oral testing and assessment in educational contexts. Rater training and double rating are necessary for oral assessment to eliminate unavoidable measurement errors by human raters. My research results indicate a need for more clearly defined assessment criteria and descriptors in the rating scales to obtain higher consistency in assessing spoken English abilities. The recent promulgation of the CEFR-based evaluation framework for L2 proficiency in Vietnam has brought both opportunities and challenges for those who are concerned about enhancing and standardising the national quality of EFL education.
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Keyword:
English as a foreign language (EFL); language testing; oral assessment; test reliability; test validity
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1401276
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