Research Design and Methods
The previous chapter consecutively renders a detailed review with regard to nonverbal delivery, and the methods of developing as well as validating a rating scale with a consideration of embedding nonverbal delivery into speaking assessment in the context
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Research Design and Methods
The previous chapter consecutively renders a detailed review with regard to nonverbal delivery, and the methods of developing as well as validating a rating scale with a consideration of embedding nonverbal delivery into speaking assessment in the context of formative assessment. In order to fulfil the three broad aims of this study, this research was carried out in a three-phase design. The first phase built an argument for incorporating nonverbal delivery into assessing EFL learners’ speaking ability when group discussion was taken as the assessment task. The second phase mainly dealt with the formulation of the rating scale, the completion of which would call for three steps. The first two steps addressed how the parts of language competence and strategic competence, nonverbal delivery in particular, were, respectively, brought forth, and the last step trialed and prevalidated the tentatively proposed the rating scale on a small scale so that its validity and practicality could be initially testified by expert raters. The third phase, which proceeded to validate the revised rating scale on a larger scale, was composed of two steps with quantitative and qualitative validation approaches. This chapter unfolds the research design and methods of the entire project in three sections. The first section presents the general research design of this study, including all the research phases responding to an argument for nonverbal delivery in speaking assessment, the development and validation of the rating scale as foreshadowed. In the second section, the data in different research phases, together with how they are processed, are detailed. The last section introduces the research methods and the research instruments with specific reference to each phase of the present study.
3.1
Research Procedure
Accorded with the aims of building an argument for nonverbal delivery in speaking assessment and designing and validating a rating scale in the context of group discussion assessment, the entire research could be chronologically broken down into (1) argument building (henceforth AB) phase, (2) rating scale formulation (henceforth RSF) phase and (3) rating scale validation (henceforth RSV) phase. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 M. Pan, Nonverbal Delivery in Speaking Assessment, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0170-3_3
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3 Research Design and Methods
At the AB phase, candidates’ nonverbal delivery in group discussion was investigated to see whether the performance by the learners across a predetermined range of proficiency levels can be discerned in the light of their nonverbal delivery. The research findings of this phase also informed the formulation of nonverbal delivery descriptors on the rating scale at the RSF phase. With regard to the RSF phase, as the specified properties of the rating scale suggest, not only the rationale of CLA would be borne in mind as the rating scale is intended to be theory-laden, but also the essentiality would be manifested regarding incorporating a dimens
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