Assessing the oral proficiency of Chinese speakers of English as a Foreign Language: Holistic rating versus the objective measure of syntactic maturity

This study was designed to examine the relationship between oral proficiency and syntactic maturity. The analysis involves a comparison of a subjective evaluation of oral proficiency (a holistic rating) and objective measures of syntactic ability (Total Number of Words, Mean T-Unit Length, Mean Error-Free T-Unit Length, and Percent of Error-Free T-Units).;Data was collected while the researcher was a faculty member at Nankai University during the academic year of 1986-1987. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) was administered to measure the oral proficiency of 107 students of English as a foreign language in Tianjin, China. The design involved a two-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures. Since the data represented three different proficiency levels (Superior, Advanced, and Intermediate) and three separate tasks of the interview (Describing/Narrating, Role Playing, and Asking Questions), the design was a 3 x 3 ANOVA with repeated measures on the interview task factor. A separate ANOVA was carried out for each of the measures of syntactic maturity, along with post hoc analyses for the significant effects.;Results indicate significant main effects for proficiency level and interview task. Since the objective measures relate to the holistic ratings in terms of a linear progression of levels, the empirical data provide some support for the holistic rating system as put forth in the ACTFL Guidelines. Raters' responses on a questionnaire concerning their choice of rating reveal that communicative factors rather than features of discrete-point sentence level grammar were most influential in determining a subject's proficiency level. These data provide further support for the Guidelines and suggest that the concerns of some critics with respect to the Guidelines' failure to mention communicative competence are unwarranted.