The Development and Validation of the Portuguese Speaking Test

Abstract

During the past decade, thanks primarily to the efforts of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the Educational Testing Service (ETS), and with the assistance of several government language training agencies under the auspices of the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR), a major theoretical and practical development in the field of foreign language assessment has taken place. This development is the application of a orientation in the testing of foreign language competence. This movement has also brought about the adoption of a proficiency approach to language instruction in many quarters. Two standards lie at the heart of the oral proficiency testing movement: the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and the ACTFL/ILR speaking proficiency guidelines. The OPI is a direct face-to-face evaluation of the learner's second language competence conducted by trained interviewers and raters. [For information on the direct oral proficiency interview used by the government the reader is referred to Wilds (1975) and Sollenberger (1978). For information on the ACTFL oral interview see Higgs (1984), and Stansfield and Harmon (1987)]. The ACTFL proficiency guidelines (ACTFL 1986), based on the earlier developed ILR guidelines, provide the criteria against which language proficiency is rated. Between 1980 and 1988, ACTFL trained approximately 1,600 oral proficiency interviewers and raters in the major foreign languages taught in the United States: Spanish, French, German, and Russian. As a result, oral proficiency testing is widely available to examinees in need of a rating of their competency in these languages. However for less commonly taught languages such as Portuguese, the scarce number of trained interviewers makes it difficult if not impractical to connect an interviewer in one part of the country with an examinee in another part of the country. This situation impedes the availability of an oral proficiency interview to an individual who may have need for such a rating. The Portuguese Speaking Test (PST), a semi-direct test of oral proficiency, was developed in response to this need. Semi-direct testing (using recorded and printed stimuli and recording examinee responses) is the most efficient and feasible approach to proficiency measurement in the less commonly taught languages. This approach eliminates the need to sustain a costly and labor intensive face-to-face (direct) Oral Proficiency Interview program for low-volume languages whose enrollment figures may be unstable from year to year. However, semidirect testing does provide the benefits derived from a continual assessment program, and it can serve as the impetus for competency-based learning on the part of students of these languages. There have been several efforts to develop semi-direct tests of oral proficiency in foreign languages. One of the earliest was the Recorded Oral Proficiency Examination (ROPE), designed and described by Lowe and Clifford (1980). In the ROPE, the examinee hears a series of tape-recorded questions in the target