A Validation Study Of An Oral Analytic Rating Scale

College teachers and students of China have always attached great importance to the cultivation of oral English proficiency. Great pains have thus been taken in its instruction both in and out of class. Nevertheless, little effort has been spared to the evaluation of this proficiency thoroughly and completely.The study presented in this dissertation, therefore, aims at establishing an oral analytic rating scale (OARS) as an attempt to solve this problem. OARS is designed on the basis of Bachman's Communicative Language Ability (CLA) model, Cohen's Rating Scale for Pragmatic Speaking, Nunn's Rating Scales for Small Group Interaction, teaching syllabuses of English majors and non English majors, as well as questionnaire survey results of 182 English teachers and 1139 students. It covers two main aspects of oral proficiency– language competence and strategic competence. The former incorporates organizational competence (pronunciation, grammar and text, to be exact) and pragmatic competence (illocutionary as well as sociolinguistic competence) while the latter evaluates flexible interaction and nonverbal communication (namely body language and paralanguage). Each of the eight sub-categories is provided with a scale from 5 as the highest to 1 as the lowest, together with detailed band descriptors.Language testing is an endeavor closely linked to practicality. Problems do occur when a theoretically well-defined testing mode is put into practice. Thus, OARS has undergone the following two stages of validation study to prove its reliability, validity and utility.The pilot study is mainly concerned with the feasibility of this rating scale, possible problems with regard to its application and its reliability and validity. It was conducted on 30 randomly selected sophomores majoring in English in University of Shanghai for Science & Technology (USST). They were randomly arranged into groups of 3 and each group was required to hold a 5-minute discussion. The picture recording of their performance was evaluated by two raters who did detailed ratings according to the band...