Oral Proficiency Testing: Meeting a Variety of Needs

Abstract

Although the last few years have seen a dramatic rise in interest in proficiency testingthe 1983 Joint Annual Meeting of the AATG and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) alone featured at least twelve sessions and several preconference workshops devoted totally or in part to the topicthe present state-of-the-art has been reached over a long period of evolution in both government and academe.' In this paper I do not intend to trace its entire history. However, after identifying briefly the primary purposes of proficiency testing, I do intend to discuss several types of tests designed to determine speaking ability that preceded the ACTFL/ETS test2 and are still in use today, and finally to describe in detail the AIMS oral proficiency testing program that my colleagues and I developed seven years ago, and which we continue to find useful in a number of special situations. The AIMS test, as I will demonstrate, is similar in many ways to the ACTFL/ETS test, not surprising since both use the Foreign Service Institute Oral Interview Test and Evaluation Procedure as a point of departure. However, our test predates the ACTFL/ETS test by a number of years and, we believe, will remain useful in the future, until the number of trained ACTFL/ETS interviewers/raters becomes large enough to meet the profession's diverse demands.