Register variation and oral proficiency sampling:

toward a discourse criterion for communicative oral tests

Jeff Connor-Linton & Elana Shomony

Sun. 11-1:05 B

Most frequently-used tests of oral proficiency assume that face-to-face interviews sufficiently sample a testee's competence, but little empirical evidence exists of the relative homogeneity of NNS oral performances elicited under different conditions. This paper reports a multi-feature/multi-dimensional analysis of register variation in NNS oral performances in English. The ultimate goal of the research reported here is identification of a limited set of lexical, syntactic, and discourse features for use as a validation criterion for communicative tests of oral proficiency.

Ten Israeli EFL students, representing a range of L2 English proficiency, responded to each of three speech act elicitation prompts (telling about oneself, complaining, and requesting) in five elicitation contexts: (1) in a traditional face-to-face interview with a tester, (2) face-to-face with a peer, (3) responding to an audiotaped prompt and (4) a videotaped prompt, and (5) by telephone. Frequencies of the 67 lexical and syntactic features selected by Biber (1988) were measured in each of the 150 samples, and the 'factor scores' of different prompts, elicitation contexts, and testee proficiency levels on Biber's dimensions of linguistic variation are compared and correlated with ratings of the samples. In addition, cooccurence relations between the lexical and syntactic features measured and 15 other `discourse' features (e.g. address terms and directness -- cf. Shohamy, Donitsa-Schmidt & Waizer 1993) are determined. Implications of the results for elicitation and sampling of oral proficiency, as well as for our understanding of communicative competence, are discussed.

In addition to its uses in test development, multi-feature, multi-dimensional analysis of NNS use of English can provide a broad representation of interlanguage development of learners from different L1s at different levels of proficiency. The factor scores of the NNS performances analyzed here are compared with the factor scores of similar NS (British) genres reported in Biber (1988).

(Register variation, oral proficiency testing, communicative competence)

References

Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shohamy, E., S. Donitsa-Schmidt, & R. Waizer. (1993) "The effect of the elecitation mode on the oral samples and scores obtained on langauge tests." Paper presented at the Language Teaching Research Colloquium, Cambridge, Summer 1993.