Group Oral Assessment Research Articles

Interactional Competence with and without Extended Planning Time in a Group Oral Assessment

ABSTRACTLinking one’s contribution to those of others’ is a salient feature demonstrating interactional competence in paired/group speaking assessments. While such responses are to be constructed spontaneously while engaging in real-time interaction, the amount and nature of pre-task preparation in paired/group speaking assessments may have an influence on how such an ability (or lack thereof) could manifest in learners’ interactional performance. Little previous research has examined the effect of planning time on interactional aspects of paired/group speaking task performance. Within the context of school-based assessment in Hong Kong, this paper analyzes the discourse of two group interactions performed by the same four student-candidates under two conditions: (a) with extended planning time (4–5 hours), and (b) without extended planning time (10 minutes), with the aim of exploring any differences in student-candidates’ performance of interactional competence in this assessment task. The analysis provides qualitative discourse evidence that extended planning time may impede the assessment task’s capacity to discriminate between stronger and weaker candidates’ ability to spontaneously produce responses contingent on previous speaker contribution. Implications for the implementation of preparation time for the group interaction task are discussed.

Validating an L2 Academic Group Oral Assessment: Insights From a Spoken Learner Corpus

ABSTRACTThis study determines the fine-grained bottom-up linguistic features involved in successful second language (L2) English academic group oral tutorial discussion through the use of a spoken learner corpus composed of more than 20 hrs of L2 production. Student performances were graded by teacher-raters using a can-do rating scale, which assessed students’ ability to participate in a group academic oral discussion. The performances were transcribed and annotated for linguistic features such as L2 errors, a range of interactive and interpersonal metadiscourse features, and a range of temporal, prosodic, lexical, and syntactic markers (or “fluencemes”) of (dis)fluency. The results of the corpus study suggest that frequent use of metadiscourse is the primary indicator of raters’ positive evaluation of student performance in L2 academic tutorial discussion, alongside frequent use of discourse markers, filled pauses, and a high speech rate per minute as fluencemes. Most L2 error types and syntactic fluencemes did not particularly feature in raters’ positive (or negative) evaluations. The detailed cross-sectional data afforded by this corpus analysis serve as quantitative evidence of the linguistic features accompanying each grade awarded across the rating scale and contributing to the construct validity of the assessment.

A Comparison of Students’ Self-Assessments With Faculty Evaluations of Their Communication Skills

To compare students' self-assessment of their communication skills with faculty members' formal evaluation of their skills in a therapeutics course. Over a 3-year period, faculty members evaluated second-year pharmacy students' communication skills as part of a requirement in a therapeutics course. Immediately following an individual oral assessment and again following a group oral assessment, students self-assessed their communication skills using the same rubric the faculty members had used. Students' self-assessments were then compared with faculty members' evaluation of students' communication skills. Four hundred one (97.3%) students consented to participate in this study. Faculty evaluation scores of students for both the individual and group oral assessments were significantly higher than students' self-assessment scores. Students' self-assessment scores of their communication skills increased from the individual to the group oral assessment. Students' self-assessments of communication skills were consistently lower than faculty members' evaluations. Greater use of oral assessments throughout the pharmacy curriculum may help to improve students' confidence in and self-assessment of their communication skills.

Gestural behavior in group oral assessment: a case study of higher‐ and lower‐scoring students

This paper reports on a microanalysis of gestural behavior in classroom assessment situations. Videotaped excerpts of secondary school ESL students engaged in a peer group oral assessment task were transcribed to represent the gestures that occurred during the interaction. Using conversation analysis as a central tool for analysis, this study explored the potential differences in use of gestures between higher‐ and lower‐scoring students in group oral language assessment situations. Results show that gestures of the higher‐scoring group appeared to be well synchronized with the flow of speech, turn‐taking, as well as other nonverbal behavior such as eye contact and facial expression, whereas the gestural behavior of the lower‐scoring group appeared to be an outward sign of language difficulties, disfluency, tension, and lack of confidence, and largely bore no association to the verbal speech. In addition, in the higher‐scoring group, gestures seemed to function at all the three discourse levels (paranarrative, metanarrative, and narrative), while in the lower‐scoring group, gestures seemed to be utilized predominantly at the paranarrative level and be involved in self‐organizational processes. Implications for current oral test criterion modification and for students' test preparation are discussed.

Interaction in group oral assessment: A case study of higher- and lower-scoring students

This article examines the interactional work in which two groups of secondary ESL students engaged to achieve and sustain participation in group oral assessment, which is designed to assess a student’s interactive communication skills in a school-based assessment context. The in-depth observation of the ways in which participants co-constructed talk-in-interaction led to the discovery of the particular pattern of speech exchange within each group.Within the higher-scoring group, the students engaged constructively and contingently with one another’s ideas, demonstrating a range of speech functions such as suggestions, agreement or disagreement, explanations, and challenges, which resulted in opportunities for substantive conversation and genuine communication to be engineered. Within the lower-scoring group, the resulting interactions appeared more structured, apparently as a result of the pre-set prompts that were originally set for the purpose of facilitating within-group discussion. However, a picture emerges of lower-scoring group members naturally engaging in negotiation of meaning over linguistic impasses, which turned out to serve as the stimulus to collaborative dialogue. There is also evidence of lower-scoring group members assisting each other through co-construction both to find the right linguistic forms and to express meaning. The nature of these interactions suggests that the group oral assessment format, as operationalized in this context, can authentically reflect students’ interactional skills and their moment-by-moment construction of social and linguistic identity. However, the lack of contingent development of topical talk within the lower-scoring group implies that the assessor’s good intentions in providing pre-set prompts may end up restricting students’ performance. The risk of such task/topic-related effects on the quality of student discourse and interaction warrants further research.

Topic Negotiation in Peer Group Oral Assessment Situations: A Conversation Analytic Approach

This study examines the production of topical talk in peer collaborative negotiation in an interactive assessment innovation context. The ability to stay on topic, to move from topic to topic and to introduce new topics appropriately is at the core of communicative competence. Applying conversation analysis (CA), we describe and analyze how one group of secondary ESL students orient to and construct what they take to be relevant to the assessment task as interaction proceeds. We found that in the context of group oral discussion described in our study, in the course of turn-by-turn interaction which was characterized by intensive engagement and active participation between peer participants, this group of students were able to pursue, develop, and shift topics to, on the one hand, ensure the successful completion of the assigned task, and on the other, to display individual contributions. Topical transitions appeared to be the result of participants constantly monitoring the content of talk for relevance to the assessment task agenda. Such negotiation of topical talk among the participants indicates that peer group discussion as an oral assessment format has the potential to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate ‘real-life’ interactional abilities to relate to each other in spoken interaction.

Examining negotiation in peer group oral assessment

This article reports on a case study of negotiation that occurred in peer group oral interactions under assessment conditions. Discourse analysis was used to illustrate how participants negotiated and co-constructed the assessment format itself as well as meaning exchange sequences. Analyses of the data point to the advantage of using peer group discussion task in generating the interaction patterns representative of natural conversational situations. By concentrating on the situated dynamics and process of peer group functioning, this study also demonstrates the importance of peer learning opportunities that resulted from collaborative reasoning under assessment conditions, which have typically been ignored in the conventional testing paradigm. Implications of these findings over validity issues in oral language assessment are discussed.

Examining negotiation in peer group oral assessment

This article reports on a case study of negotiation that occurred in peer group oral interactions under assessment conditions. Discourse analysis was used to illustrate how participants negotiated and co-constructed the assessment format itself as well as meaning exchange sequences. Analyses of the data point to the advantage of using peer group discussion task in generating the interaction patterns representative of natural conversational situations. By concentrating on the situated dynamics and process of peer group functioning, this study also demonstrates the importance of peer learning opportunities that resulted from collaborative reasoning under assessment conditions, which have typically been ignored in the conventional testing paradigm. Implications of these findings over validity issues in oral language assessment are discussed.

Using Action Research to Improve Communication and Facilitate Group Work in a Multicultural Classroom: A South African Case Study

This study started with problems that my colleagues (and I) were experiencing with interaction and intercultural communication among students in our diverse classrooms. Educators were also experiencing difficulties in motivating students to work effectively in groups. The purpose of this paper was to seek solutions to these problems by exploring variations of the group oral assessment structure in a multilingual and multicultural context. Four phases of assessments were conducted at two tertiary institutions in South Africa using a combination of action research and a participatory approach. Not only did this study succeed in addressing the problems but it also revealed the added benefits of using an action research methodology.