Oral language testing at tay nguyen university  (Page 8/53)

Another crucial feature of spoken language is length of its production, that is the language is orally produced at length or not. Speech consisting of only one or two utterances is defined as a short turn, and that of a string of utterances is defined as a long turn by Underhill (1987, p.16). Taking short turns is of course less demanding than taking long turns. When in position of taking a transactional long turn, a speaker is immediately ‘responsible for creating a structured sequence of utterances which must help the listener(s) to create a coherent mental representation of what he is trying to say’.

As regards these two features a product of spoken language can be considered in such a continuum as interactional short turns – transactional short turns – transactional long turns. The difficulty of spoken language production ranges from the one extreme to the other extreme of the continuum, and the level of difficulty is shown in the figure 2.1 below. Clearly teaching as well as testing speaking skill should gradually follow this continuum according to learners’ level of language proficiency.

Interactional Transactional

Short turns

Long turns

Figure 2.1: Continuum of Spoken Language Production

The above figure indicates that content to be taught or assessed should be graded according to the difficulty of tasks intended for the course purposes. The degree of this difficulty is determined by communicative stress, which involves three conditions under which a speaker feel more or less comfortable in producing what he has to (Brown and Yule, 1983, p.34). The less stressful a task is, the easier it is for speakers to carry out. These three conditions are features of the context, state of knowledge of the listener and type of task shown in the figure 2.2 below.

Communicative StressState of knowledge of the listenerType of taskFeatures of the context-The listener-The situation-The language-The information-Status of knowledge-Structure of the task

Figure 2.2: Conditions of Communicative Stress in a Task

The listener refers to the relationship between the speaker and the listener, or the number of the listeners he is talking to. The situation is concerned with the speaking environment (is it familiar or unfamiliar, and private or in public?). The language relates to the listener(s)’ language proficiency in comparison with the speaker’s, and the information is what the listener wants or needs. Status of knowledge mentions the degree of familiarity of the task’s topic, and structure of the task refers to the purpose of the task or the difficulty of the task itself. This difficulty ranges from the static relationships to the abstract relationships between what is being talked about and what is going to be said. Obviously, tasks involving ‘abstract relationships are more difficult than those involving the description of static and dynamic relationships’ (Nunan, 1991, p. 48). O’Malley&Pierce (1996, p. 76) state these relationships correspond to an increase in difficulty levels. The tasks intended for the purpose(s) of teaching or testing should thus be graded according to these relationships as follows: