Students’ Oral Assessment Considering Various Task Dimensions and Difficulty Factors

Abstract

This study investigated students’ oral performance ability accounting for various oral analytical factors including fluency, lexical and structural complexity and accuracy with each subcategory. Accordingly, 20 raters scored the oral performances produced by 200 students and a quantitative design using a MANOVA test was used to investigate students’ score differences of various levels of language proficiency groups with respect to their oral scores in each analytical factor. The findings showed that students, in each level of language proficiency, were different from each other regarding various measures of fluency, lexical complexity, structural complexity and accuracy when performing the five oral tasks. Besides, the findings showed that language planning, perspective and immediacy were the determining dimensions in oral task difficulty. The findings demonstrated the usefulness of analytical approaches to rater training programs in detecting rater effects and demonstrating the consistency and variability in rater behavior. The analysis confirmed that the nature of second language oral construct is not constant, thus different results are achieved using different oral task dimensions. Consequently, the outcomes have constructive implications in the use of feedback as a reliable indicator of task difficulty and specifically as a basis for test design and validation.