2018 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Interactional Engagement in EFL Oral Proficiency Testing
| Project/Area Number |
17K03011
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| Research Institution | Kobe University |
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Principal Investigator |
T・S Greer 神戸大学, 大学教育推進機構, 教授 (10320540)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-01 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | 会話分析 / 英語教育 / 外国語口頭力評価 / 関与力 / 英語ディスカッション能力 |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This grant constitutes an investigation into the notion of engagement in EFL oral proficiency test contexts. Even when test-takers have relatively low linguistic skills in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity, it is still often possible for them to take an active part in a conversation with the limited interactional resources they have available: this means there is a need to assess their ability to engage in conversation, a skill that goes beyond linguistic competence. The researcher used Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate examples of such social interaction in a corpus of 73 paired English speaking tests in order to empirically specify the notion of engagement and develop an oral assessment rubric that takes into account students' active interactional participation. This grounded analysis was developed from collections of interactional competences within the students' speech, with a particular focus on the effectiveness of those interactional practices for maintaining and extending the conversation. Based on this, the researcher then used inter-rater hermeneutic dialogues (Walters, 2007) to establish a test rubric that measures the students' engagement in the conversation and trialed it in later oral proficiency tests.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
The project is currently on target. In 2018 I finished transcribing the core student discussion tests and developed a detailed written rubric based on key data segments that demonstrate aspects pertinent to engagement within the data set. The rubric was then tested with test raters who were unfamiliar with both the test setting and the rubric. These raters compared the scores they came up with via the rubric while watching the videos. Collaboration with Erica Sandlund (Karstad University, Sweden) has led to joint research on this approach based on a comparison with similar rubrics being used in Swedish high schools.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I am currently co-authoring a paper with Dr Erika Sandlund to be published in a special issue of the journal Papers In Language Testing and Assessment in 2020.
I am planning to present the results of this research at the ICOP-L2 conference in Sweden in May 2019 and at the Australian Association of Applied Linguistics conference in November 2019.
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| Causes of Carryover |
I was initially intending to present these findings at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Atlanta in March 2019, but due to entrance examination commitments here in Japan I was unable to attend. My collaborator Erika Sandlund presented our joint paper on my behalf. Because of this, some funds remained and I would like to use these instead to present the findings at an alternative venue during AY2019.
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