Investigating examiner interventions in relation to the listening demands they make on candidates in oral interview tests

Examiners intervene in second language oral interviews in order to elicit intended language functions, to probe a candidate’s proficiency level or to keep the interaction going. Interventions of this kind can affect the candidate’s output language and score, since the candidate is obliged to process them as a listener and respond to them as a speaker. This chapter reports on a study that examined forty audio-recorded interviews of the oral test of a major European examination board, with a view to examining examiner interventions (i.e., questions, comments) in relation to the listening demands they make upon candidates. Half of the interviews involved candidates who scored highly on the test while the other half featured low-scoring candidates. This enabled a comparison of the language and behaviour of the same examiner across candidate proficiency levels, to see how they were modified in response to the communicative competence of the candidate. The recordings were transcribed and analyzed with regard to a) types of examiner intervention in terms of linguistic and pragmatic features and b) the extent to which the interventions varied in response to the proficiency level of the candidate. The study provides a new insight into examiner-examinee interactions, by identifying how examiners are differentiating listening demands according to the task types and the perceived proficiency level of the candidate. It offers several implications about the ways in which examiner interventions engage candidates’ listening skills, and the ways in which listening skills can be more validly and reliably measured when using a format based on examiner-candidate interaction

SPEECH PLANNINGS IN THE STUDENTS’ CONVERSATION (A CASE STUDY OF FOURTH SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, DIAN NUSWANTORO UNIVERSITY)

This study is aimed at describing the speech plannings employed by the fourth semester students of English Department, Dian Nuswantoro University in making conversation with their friends. The data was collected by recording the students’ conversation. The conversation lasted for about 30 minutes. The data, then, was transcribed into the written form. In analyzing the data, the writer used the framework proposed by Faerch and Kasper (1983:214). The result showed that the speech plannings the students usually attempted in making conversation are: temporal variables such as pause (filled), drawls ; hesitation phenomena such as filled pause, repetition, and correction; and other phenomena like slip, switch, uptake signal, and interjection. From the kinds of speech plannings mentioned above it can be said that pauses (filled) were the most attempted by the students so they could gain time for execution. In general, the speech plannings attempted by the students indicate that the students’ speaking readiness is low. In other words, they often find problems in their conversation

The motivational challenge facing beginner learners of Spanish at a distance

This paper presents some preliminary findings of an on-going longitudinal study of initial motivation and motivation maintenance in beginner distance adult learners of Spanish in the UK. Adapting a framework of executive motivational influences developed in the context of classroom teaching (Dörnyei, 2001a) to the distance learning process, data was obtained from questionnaires and follow-up interviews with a sample of questionnaire respondents. This paper explores meaningful descriptors of the most prevalent types of motivation found within this group. Drawing primarily on the interview data, it also presents early steps towards learner autonomy taken by these learners based on their own perceptions, and highlights the predominance of metacognitive over other strategies at this stage in their learning. Finally it analyses some of the motivational influences of tutors and of other learners, and their roles in supporting and affirming the learning endeavour, and indicates areas for follow-up research with beginner distance language learners within this study

Dual Language and ENL Comprehension: A First Grade Study for Students at Risk for Delayed English Language Development

This research began by asking how dual language programming impacts English comprehension for ENL students. Research was conducted within one first grade dual language cohort with five bilingual students. The data was collected by interviewing teachers and students, utilizing historical comprehension data, observing read alouds, and assessing student comprehension. Findings revealed that comprehension in a participant’s first language was positively related to English comprehension. However, individual student differences impacted the extent of the correlation. Furthermore, dual language teachers implemented common instructional practices to scaffold ENL student comprehension. Therefore, the data implied that native language instruction is integral, student backgrounds and differences need to be analyzed, and dual language educators need adequate professional development to best aid ENL comprehension

“[She] said : ‘take the test’ and I took the test”. Relational work as a framework to approach directiveness in prenatal screening of Chinese clients in Hong Kong

In this paper we apply the framework of relational work, or the work individuals invest in maintaining their relationships (Locher and Watts 2005), to the analysis of prenatal screening (PS) for Down Syndrome of Chinese clients in Hong Kong. PS has traditionally followed a nondirective principle that calls for an unbiased presentation of information and women’s autonomous decision- making regarding testing. However, in Chinese contexts, healthcare providers appear extremely directive; and women, in turn, explicitly express their expectations of being led in decision-making (Zayts et al. 2013). These observations lend support to previous politeness studies of Chinese institutional contexts wherein hierarchical communication has been described as “listening-centered, asymmetrical and differential” (Gao and Ting-Toomey 1998: 48). More recent politeness studies, however, warn against such stereotyping at a cultural level (Eelen 2001; Mills 2003, 2004; Watts 2003). In this paper, rather than using culture as an a priori explanatory variable to account for the directive stance of the healthcare providers, we argue that using the framework of relational work enables researchers to focus on how meaning is created and negotiated at the micro-level of an interaction, and to move away from “grand generalizations” about culture specific behaviors and expectations