Rethinking Assessment of Thai EFL Learners' Speaking Skills
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Volume two, Issue four
October 2012
Rethinking Assessment of Thai EFL Learners’ Speaking Skills KEMTONG SINWONGSUWAT Prince of Songkla University, Thailand Bio Data: Kemtong Sinwongsuwat has a Ph.D. in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been lecturing at Prince of Songkla University for almost five years after her graduation. She currently teaches both undergraduate and graduate students at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and has a special interest in Conversation Analysis (CA), interactional linguistics, corpus linguistics, and the development of Thai EFL learners’ oral communication skills. Abstract This paper reassesses the mainstream tasks used for evaluating Thai ELF learners’ speaking skills: face-to-face interview and role-play. Based on final and preliminary findings from small-scale classroom research, it examines the capacity of these two tasks to assess the learners’ conversation skills in particular and recommends a task that is more oriented towards features of natural conversation; i.e., nonscripted role-play. It is argued that if implemented with an appropriate rubric, this task should enable us to better assess the students’ ability to converse in naturally-occurring communicative situations and with practice make it possible to develop students with better proficiency in English conversation. Some implications are also noted for English conversation teaching stemming from the proposed application of the assessment task in Thai EFL classroom contexts. Keywords: Speaking-skill assessment, face-to-face interview, scripted and non-scripted role-plays, Conversation Analysis (CA), Thai EFL learners, English conversation abilities Introduction Nowadays, EFL learners’ speaking skills are assessed mainly via the elicitation of talk in such scenarios as in a face-to-face speaking test or in a computer-mediated oral test which is part of a large-scale language proficiency test. Undertaken in the semi-direct test mode in which learners are required to respond to a series of prompts delivered by a computer either online or CD-ROM-based, the latter approach to assessing speaking is gaining popularity as witnessed in its implementation by large assessment organizations such as ETS, Pearson, and Cambridge ESOL (Galaczi, 2010). Despite the benefits of such a test especially in 75 | P a g e
Language Testing in Asia
Volume two, Issue four
October 2012
assessing a large population of test takers, it is however undeniable that for teachers and practitioners in most institutional settings, including classroom contexts, the traditional face-to-face direct test, where learners are required to interact with each other or with the examiner(s), is still more feasible and even necessary. Internationally, the movement towards communicative language teaching coupled with the publication of such function-oriented proficiency benchmarks for speaking as the 1986 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Guidelines has inspired a large body of research into oral
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