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.