The Rating of Direct and Semi‐Direct Oral Proficiency Interviews: Comparing Performance at Lower Proficiency Levels

Abstract

As states and universities institute oral proficiency requirements with vast numbers of students to be tested, there is a need to investigate effective alternatives to the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) that allow group testing. This article reports on a study comparing student performances and test reliabilities for the German Speaking Test (GST) developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics, a semi‐direct tape‐mediated oral proficiency test, and the ACTFL OPI. Both the GST and a German OPI were administered as final oral exams to a randomly selected group of 20 students (out of a total of 59 students) enrolled in a fourth‐semester German course at a large Midwestern university. The OPI levels of the students tested ranged from Novice High (n= 5) and Intermediate Low (n= 9) to Intermediate Mid (n= 6). At these 3 levels, final ratings on the GST and the OPI agreed with each other perfectly in 90% of the cases. There were only 2 one‐step disagreements, both involving students who were rated Novice High on the ACTFL OPI, but who received other ratings on the GST. Although the results indicated a high score equivalency between ACTFL proficiency ratings obtained on both tests, this study underscores the pressing need for double ratings and arbitration procedures in high stakes testing situations.