Super(ior) Talker

Last week I dialed into the Language Testing Institute (LTI) of ACTFL in order to prove that I can, in fact, speak English.

This officially certifiable oral proficiency interview (OPI) by an ACTFL rater is a necessary step to becoming certified to conduct ACTFL OPIs. In addition to speaking hours interviewing and rating ESL speakers, I also need to prove that I meet the ACTFL guidelines for a superior level speaker.

The interview, which didn't make me nervous, but did make me curious due to the fact that I have only ever done this from the interviewer side, started 20 minutes late due to the interviewer's late conducting of the previous interview. But, since I knew what kinds of speech sample the interviewer needed to elicit from me, I think that we were able to make the conversation move along rather quickly, I was surprised to learn that the interview had only taken about 20 minutes (a typical superior level interview can take 30 minutes), but we had covered a variety of topics and had plenty of samples of superior level speech for her to analyze.

The results of the interview were posted today, and I am, in fact, a superior speaker of English. Surprise! I guess all these years of learning and practicing English have really paid off. What a relief.

Of course this is only one small step in this OPI experience. I still need to get the trainer's feedback from my practice round, and then I will have to work at collecting interviews for my certification round (where I actually have to do a good job as opposed to just learning as I did this summer). Here's hoping the trainer doesn't rush to send me the feedback. I've got enough projects to do.

Although I did accomplish to important tasks today: I got the integrated writing practice tasks sent to the programmer (for pilot testing next month) and I submitted my integrate tasks IRB application. It's all working out, despite my poor planning and procrastination.

Integrated Writing Task

My plans for a dissertation topic revolve around the use of integrated writing tasks. These exam items, used in ESL assessment, require students to write about a reading and listening passage. We are now piloting the use of integrated writing tasks at our center.

Reasons Why We Want to Implement the Integrated Task

• Every semester we inevitably deal with cases of unintentional plagiarism due to students whose summary, paraphrase, and quoting skills are weak
• Most of our students are planning to attend university in the USA and need to learn English for Academic Purposes (EAP) which involves writing from sources
• Integrated writing tasks are now part of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) which many of our students want to take and "pass"

Differences Between the TOEFL's and Our Integrated Tasks

• Our integrated tasks are used in connection with our Level Achievement Tests in order to assess students' readiness to move on the next class level whereas the TOEFL is used to assess readiness for university study which our program only assesses in an indirect form through level advancement
• Our implementation of the integrated tasks will assess student ability from novice to low advanced, namely our Levels 1 through 5; the TOEFL is designed to assess a narrower band of language ability, namely the ability of students in our Levels 4 and 5
  
• The TOEFL tasks are rated individually, but the integrated tasks will likely become part of our holistic portfolio score, or maybe even a subset portfolio score for fluency (non-draft) writing

In order to properly implement these tasks for our own center, I'm conducting a literature review of relevant studies. The first:

• Cumming, A., Kantor, R., Baba, K., Erdosy, U., Eouanzoui, K, & James, M. (2005). Differences in written discourse in independent and integrated prototype tasks for next generation TOEFL. Assessing Writing, 10, 5-43.
  
• This study analyzed a variety of textual features of prototype integrated tasks versus the current independent writing tasks. It suggests that integrated tasks encourage the use of a greater variety of vocabulary and greater use of source ideas. The independent tasks are better at eliciting more language and at developing better arguments from examinees.
  
• I hope to be able to use this study as a model for the quantitative analysis of my dissertation research. Like the Cumming et al. study, I will examine a variety of discourse features and how they differ between responses to our independent and integrated tasks; I will also plan to look at these language features as they differ across our 5 proficiency levels.
  

I'll add more studies as I read them.

Moving forward

I heard back from IRB today. My request to extend my research has been granted. Of course now that I want to do a different (but related) study for my dissertation, I will need to submit a new IRB application.

Why start something new for my dissertation? I'm applying for assistant professor positions (to start next Fall) and one of them is looking for expertise in an area that I haven't focused on very much: oral assessment and listening/speaking pedagogy. Of course I had taught L/S classes, and I'm in the process of becoming OPI certified, but I haven't done much on this topic from a research perspective. So now's my chance.

Truth is, whatever an employer wants me to be an expert in, I can do it. I have only become focused on writing assessment and methodology because:

1) My thesis chair wanted to research it, so I did it for my thesis, and
2) My current job as the writing coordinator requires me to become an expert on it.

So if a potential position requires expertise in something else, I can do it. My revised dissertation project will:

1) Build on my current research,
2) Relate directly to what I do for my job anyway, and
3) Extend my expertise to include research on L/S assessment.

So we'll see how it goes. The fact is, if I want to be ready for these jobs that start Fall 2008, then I need to be all but done my research by then, which gives me less than a year to plan, conduct, and write my dissertation. Heh. Who knows? I could do it. Probably. Maybe. Yeah. And if nothing else, this job application process will motivate me to graduate ahead of schedule. And there's nothing bad about that idea.