Keywords

oral proficiency assessment, ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), cost-effective language assessment

Abstract

A Russian student wants to know if it is worth the expense to pay for an official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). The director of a flagship program wants to measure the improvement of the oral proficiency of students returning from their in-country experience. A university department needs to provide evidence that their students are meeting learning objectives as part of accreditation. In each of these cases, a cost-effective, scalable solution to measuring oral proficiency would be helpful.

Assessing speaking ability in a foreign language has traditionally been a difficult and time-intensive task. A traditional method of measuring oral language proficiency involves role plays or interviews in the target language, which can be both time consuming and labor intensive. One of the most broadly accepted measures of oral proficiency is the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) OPI, which requires a thirty-minute sample of spoken speech that is then rated by at least two qualified raters. Most language-learning institutions do not have the time or resources to engage in this process with any degree of regularity, especially on a large scale. Moreover, the price of the OPI can be prohibitive for many institutions.

Original Publication Citation

Cox, T., Bown, J. & Burdis, J. (2016) Elicited imitation as a predictor of language proficiency for learners of Russian. Russian Language Journal, 66(1): 51-88. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26433051

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2016

Publisher

Russian Language Journal

Language

English

College

Humanities

Department

Linguistics

University Standing at Time of Publication

Associate Professor

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Included in

Linguistics Commons

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