Assessment of Oral Skills in Adolescents.

Marta Gràcia,Jesús M Alvarado,Silvia Nieva

doi:10.3390/children8121136

Abstract

There is broad consensus on the need to foster oral skills in middle school due to their inherent importance and because they serve as a tool for learning and acquiring other competences. In order to facilitate the assessment of communicative competence, we hereby propose a model which establishes five key dimensions for effective oral communication: interaction management; multimodality and prosody; textual coherence and cohesion; argumentative strategies; and lexicon and terminology. Based on this model, we developed indicators to measure the proposed dimensions, thus generating a self-report tool to assess oral communication in middle school. Following an initial study conducted with 168 students (mean age = 12.47 years, SD = 0.41), we selected 22 items with the highest discriminant power, while in a second study carried out with a sample of 960 students (mean age 14.11 years, SD = 0.97), we obtained evidence concerning factorial validity and the relationships between oral skills, emotional intelligence and metacognitive strategies related to metacomprehension. We concluded that the proposed model and its derived measure constitute an instrument with good psychometric properties for a reliable and valid assessment of students’ oral competence in middle school.

Highlights

In order to maximize instrument reliability, item–test correlations were assessed and items that did not contribute to the internal consistency of the measure were progressively eliminated
After the eliminating eight items, we obtained a shortened version of 22 items with a reliability of 0.85. This reliability analysis was equivalent to a one-factor exploratory factor analysis (EFA), whereby items with low factor weights were eliminated, and it represents a suitable strategy for achieving measures in which the first factor captures most of the variance [75]
To determine whether the structure could be considered essentially unidimensional, alternative unidimensional and bifactor models were tested and the results indicated that the total test score could legitimately be used as a measure of self-perceived oral competence [79,80]

Summary

Introduction

Research on oral language learning has yielded a variety of theoretical models which attribute greater or lesser explanatory power to the influence of the environment (interlocutors) on oral language learning [1,2,3]. Analyses of oral language corpora and the application of psycholinguistic approaches, drawing on emergentist and/or learning-based theories, broadened the scope of oral communicative competence research to include a functional perspective within natural settings [6,7,8]. Research on interaction situations that facilitate the development of oral skills in school contexts generated an abundant literature illustrating a variety of approaches, including language teaching, dialogic teaching, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programs and integrated language teaching [9]. Some authors created specific teacher development tools to promote such methods [10,11,12,13,14]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion