Oral language testing at tay nguyen university  (Page 6/53)

The same question was put forwards for discussion with the teachers and the assessors of speaking skill. Most of them believed that those students deserved high scores because they actually performed their tasks fluently and were able to answer the questions of the examiners. Nevertheless, when the author asked these teachers what particular speaking abilities they expected to see in the students’ test performance, what exact criteria their assessment was based on, and what the detailed procedure for test design was, they did not all provided any specific and clear answers. They could not point out speaking abilities expected, they have assessed students’ test performance intuitively, and they have constructed oral tests in their own way. Thus, as can be concluded that there seems to have never been any official detailed guidance for the construction and administration of oral tests at this institution.

Most of the staff members whom I have discussed this matter with have shared the same worry and showed interest in how to gain a scientific approach to assessing our students’ oral ability properly and fairly. In other words, we all would like to find out how to appropriately measure the students’ speaking ability and how to write useful speaking tests. This aims at helping to ensure fairness for the students, and improve and maintain the training quality of the institution.

All the concerns described above indicate an urgent need to evaluate the reality of oral language testing at TNU in the light of language testing theory. A thorough study is carried out as an attempt to help the staff give the oral testing an adequate position in their training program.

1.2 aims and overview of the thesis

This thesis is carried out with the two main aims: firstly, to investigate the existing oral testing practices at TNU; and secondly, to make suggestions for improvement. Based on Bachman and Palmer’s theoretical frammework for developing language tests, the author recommends a procedure for speaking test development as an attempt to provide a profound understanding of how to properly develop an oral test. Therefore, these recommendations are hopefully used as guidelines for oral language test development not only at TNU but also at other institutions throughout Vietnam. The data used for the two purposes above are collected from two different sources: (1) a detailed analysis of current oral testing practices at TNU, in particular, the development procedure of an achievement speaking test; and (2) a questionnaire survey given out to 12 TNU teachers of English to investigate their perceptions of oral testing and thus to find out the cause(s) of the current practices.

The thesis consists of five chapters as follows:

Chapter 1 identifies the problem and provides an overview of the thesis.

Chapter 2 reviews the literature related to major issues in oral language testing such as essential features of spoken language, a theoretical framework for test development in general and development of oral tests in particular, and major qualities of a test.