Investigating examiner interventions in relation to the listening demands they make on candidates in oral interview tests
Authors
Nakatsuhara, FumiyoIssue Date
2018-08-08Subjects
speakingassessment
second language listening
language assessment
Q330 English as a second language
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Emerging issues in the assessment of second language listeningAbstract
Examiners intervene in second language oral interviews in order to elicit intended language functions, to probe a candidate’s proficiency level or to keep the interaction going. Interventions of this kind can affect the candidate’s output language and score, since the candidate is obliged to process them as a listener and respond to them as a speaker. This chapter reports on a study that examined forty audio-recorded interviews of the oral test of a major European examination board, with a view to examining examiner interventions (i.e., questions, comments) in relation to the listening demands they make upon candidates. Half of the interviews involved candidates who scored highly on the test while the other half featured low-scoring candidates. This enabled a comparison of the language and behaviour of the same examiner across candidate proficiency levels, to see how they were modified in response to the communicative competence of the candidate. The recordings were transcribed and analyzed with regard to a) types of examiner intervention in terms of linguistic and pragmatic features and b) the extent to which the interventions varied in response to the proficiency level of the candidate. The study provides a new insight into examiner-examinee interactions, by identifying how examiners are differentiating listening demands according to the task types and the perceived proficiency level of the candidate. It offers several implications about the ways in which examiner interventions engage candidates’ listening skills, and the ways in which listening skills can be more validly and reliably measured when using a format based on examiner-candidate interaction.Citation
Nakatsuhara F (2018) 'Investigating examiner interventions in relation to the listening demands they make on candidates in oral interview tests', in Ockey G, Wagner E (ed(s).). Assessing L2 listening: Moving towards authenticity, Philadelphia: John Benjamins pp.206-225.Publisher
John BenjaminsAdditional Links
https://benjamins.com/catalog/lllt.50Type
Book chapterLanguage
enISBN
97890272012709789027263636
Sponsors
This research was funded by Trinity College London, and carried out under the Trinity Funded Research Programme.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1075/lllt.50.14nak
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/