Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 145

APRIL GINTHER

Assessment of speaking requires that we either observe a “live” oral performance or capture the performance by some means for later evaluation. Capturing speaking performances in audio and video, once a considerable challenge, has become a relatively easy task due to technological advances. As Lim (2018) observes:

Technology has made face‐to‐face conversations between people thousands of miles apart—once by definition a contradiction in terms—not only possible but increasingly commonplace, giving rise to learners who are “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001). Automated technologies are also beginning to be applied more widely to the delivery and scoring of speaking tests (Bernstein, 2012; Xi, Higgins, Zechner, & Williamson, 2012). (p. 215)

Facilitated by the availability of computer‐based assessment platforms, language programs now have expanded opportunities to place, evaluate, and track the progress of their own students/examinees. The merits of localization (O'Sullivan, 2005), the process of examining the fit between large‐scale, international assessments and the characteristics of test takers within their own contexts, easily extend to the growth of locally developed, embedded speaking assessments.

Language testers and applied linguists have offered cognitive, psycholinguistic, and sociocultural perspectives that provide strong practical and theoretical foundations for the development of and research on speaking assessments, including but not limited to research on fluency (Segalowitz, 2010; De Jong, 2018), pronunciation (Isaacs & Trofimovitch, 2017; Kang & Ginther, 2017), varieties (Dimova, 2017), and interaction (Galaczi & Taylor, 2018; Plough, Banerjee, & Iwashita, 2018). These multifaceted perspectives enrich and expand our conceptualizations of the underlying constructs (see Ginther & McIntosh, 2018) and allow test developers to create speaking assessments that focus on the aspects of speaking they value most highly. However, to develop reliable and valid speaking assessments, it makes sense to begin with the basics: methods, scales, and raters.