Oral language testing at tay nguyen university  (Page 35/53)

Thirdly, as shown in Table 4.7, for Question 3 option (a) has been selected by only 4 subjects, which means that the majority are able to realize the need to include more than one task or elicitation technique in a test of overall speaking ability as discussed in 2.3.2 (Chapter 2). However, in their selection of proper elicitation techniques or tasks for each level, they reveal their inability to recognize the difficulty level of the given elicitation techniques according to communicative stress (Figure 2.1 – Chapter 2), particularly the difficulty of the tasks themselves. To prove this, as shown in Table 4.8, only 2 out of 12 subjects have chosen (d) (the correct answer) for the first level and (c) (the correct answer) for the second level while 6 subjects have chosen (g) (the wrong answer) for the first level.

Besides, this failure is more strongly confirmed by the information gathered from Question 5. As shown in Table 4.9, only 2 out of 12 subjects have chosen (e) (the correct answer) for the first level, 3 have chosen (d) (the correct answer) for the second level, and 2 have chosen (h) (the correct answer) for the third level whereas up to 9 of them have chosen (c) (the wrong answer) for the second level, and 10 have chosen (d) (the wrong answer) for the third level. This result suggests that most of TNU English teaching staff are unable to recognize the difficulty level based on the relationship within each specified task as mentioned in 2.1 (Chapter 2).

Fourthly, as regards all the steps to be sufficiently considered in the development process of speaking tests as described in 2.4 (Chapter 2), only half of the subjects (6/12) have selected option (e) (Table 4.10), and the other options have not been chosen by all the subjects. This partly reveals the subjects’ incomplete grasp of language test development. As shown in Table 4.7 (Question 3), there is a great agreement on combining more than one kind of elicitation techniques in a test of overall speaking ability (8 subjects/12). However, in relation to the requirements in the development process of a speaking test, half of them have failed to recognize the importance of identifying the number of test tasks or elicitation techniques included in a speaking test.

Lastly, concerning the usefulness of the oral tests in use at TNU, 10 out of 12 subjects, as revealed in Table 4.11 (Question 7), do not entirely believe that their marks given on the students’ oral test performance could reveal the students’ actual speaking ability. These 10 teachers have all chosen option (a), as shown in Table 4.12, which implies that in most of the oral tests the students were informed of the topics or test questions during the class time, and they were well prepared for what they were going to speak before the real tests actually occurred. Such speaking tests can thus be said to lack authenticity, defined as ‘the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to a target language use task’ (Bachman&Palmer, 1996, p. 23), because they do not represent real life language use. Therefore, many of the teachers (7/10) think that the elicitation techniques commonly used in most of the tests are unable to elicit the students’ actual speaking ability (option c). In addition, half of them (5/10) have selected the other two reasons for their low confidence in their own given marks. For the first reason, perhaps they think the students could even guess and prepare what they could be asked about as in many cases the topics or test questions were given beforehand. For the second reason, they have had no specified assessment criteria or guideline to base their marking on as described in 4.1.1. As a result, they have had to ‘design’ their own criteria.