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Applied Linguistics Advance Access originally published online on October 26, 2007
Applied Linguistics 2008 29(1):24-49; doi:10.1093/applin/amm017
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© Oxford University Press 2008

Assessed Levels of Second Language Speaking Proficiency: How Distinct?

Noriko Iwashita1, Annie Brown2, Tim McNamara3 and Sally O’Hagan3

1The University of Queensland, 2Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 3The University of Melbourne


  Abstract

The study reported in this paper is an investigation of the nature of speaking proficiency in English as a second language in the context of a larger project to develop a rating scale for a new international test of English for Academic Purposes, TOEFL iBT (Brown et al. 2005). We report on a large-scale study of the relationship between detailed features of the spoken language produced by test-takers and holistic scores awarded by raters to these performances. Spoken test performances representing five different tasks and five different proficiency levels (200 performances in all) were analyzed using a range of measures of grammatical accuracy and complexity, vocabulary, pronunciation, and fluency. The results showed that features from each category helped distinguish overall levels of performance, with particular features of vocabulary and fluency having the strongest impact. Overall, the study contributes important insights into the nature of spoken proficiency as it develops and can be measured in rating scales for speaking, and has implications for methodological issues of the appropriateness of the use in language testing research contexts of measures developed in research on second language acquisition.


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