Oral language testing at tay nguyen university  (Page 24/53)

Secondly, the investigation of TNU current oral testing also involved a survey of the English teaching staff’s perceptions of oral skill assessment. The survey was conducted in the form of questionnaires. The questionnaires were delivered to the respondents and collected one week later. The respondents were clearly informed of the purpose of the questionnaire.

The questionnaire (See Appendix 4) is written in Vietnamese to make sure that the respondents’ different extent of familiarity of some technical terms in language testing does not affect their understanding of the questions and thus distort their responses.

3.4 summary

Chapter 3 has raised the two research questions and described the research methods employed, particularly the subjects of the study, the data collection instruments used to serve the purposes of the study, and the way the study was conducted. The data collection instruments include a checklist for oral test development summarizing the oral test development process at TNU described, tape recordings of actual test performance used to supplement the operationalization and administration processes of achievement speaking tests, and questionnaires formulated to investigate the staff’s perceptions of oral testing. The data gathered from the study will be thoroughly analysed in the next chapter.

Chapter 4: results and discussion

Chapter 3 has outlined the two research methods used to carry out the study: the situation analysis and the questionnaire survey. The situation analysis is meant to evaluate the current oral test development at TNU while the survey is aimed at investigating the staff’s understanding of oral language testing. Chapter 4 is thus divided into two sections evaluating (1) the current development process of speaking tests and (2) the staff’s perceptions of oral skill assessment.

4.1 evaluation of tnu current development process of oral language tests

As previously mentioned, the analysis of TNU current development process of speaking tests and the observation of one real end-of-term speaking test are intended for the evaluation of the practices of developing speaking tests. This section (1) starts with a detailed review of the present development process of speaking tests summarized in the checklist, (2) presents the results gathered from the observation of the particular achievement speaking test, and (3) analyses the results in order to reach a conclusion of whether TNU current procedures for oral test development are consistent with the theoretical framework or not.

4.1.1 review of tnu current development process of oral language tests

Information regarding the existing practices of developing English speaking tests at TNU described in this sub-section plays an essential role in the critical evaluation of these practices. TNU current oral test development process is described in relation to such four main factors as (1) the test design stage, (2) the test operationalization stage, (3) the test administration stage, and (4) the use of test results.