The Rating of Direct and Semi-Direct Oral Proficiency Interviews: Comparing Performance at Lower Proficiency Levels

As states and universities institute oral proficiency requirements with vast numbers of students to be tested, there is a need to investigate effective alternatives to the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) that allow group testing. This article reports on a study comparing student performances...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Modern language journal (Boulder, Colo.) Colo.), 2000-04, Vol.84 (1), p.85-101
Main Authors: Kenyon, Dorry M., Tschirner, Erwin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arbitration
College Students
Comparative Analysis
Correlations
Educational administration
German
Higher Education
Language arts
Language Proficiency
Language Tests
Learning rate
Nonnative languages
Oral Language
Second Language Instruction
Second Language Learning
Statistical variance
Test Reliability
Testing
Training
Training devices
World language instruction
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Summary:As states and universities institute oral proficiency requirements with vast numbers of students to be tested, there is a need to investigate effective alternatives to the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) that allow group testing. This article reports on a study comparing student performances and test reliabilities for the German Speaking Test (GST) developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics, a semi-direct tape-mediated oral proficiency test, and the ACTFL OPI. Both the GST and a German OPI were administered as final oral exams to a randomly selected group of 20 students (out of a total of 59 students) enrolled in a fourth-semester German course at a large Midwestern university. The OPI levels of the students tested ranged from Novice High (n = 5) and Intermediate Low (n = 9) to Intermediate Mid (n = 6). At these 3 levels, final ratings on the GST and the OPI agreed with each other perfectly in 90% of the cases. There were only 2 one-step disagreements, both involving students who were rated Novice High on the ACTFL OPI, but who received other ratings on the GST. Although the results indicated a high score equivalency between ACTFL proficiency ratings obtained on both tests, this study underscores the pressing need for double ratings and arbitration procedures in high stakes testing situations.
ISSN:0026-7902
1540-4781
DOI:10.1111/0026-7902.00054