Interview And Discussion Activity In Assessing Conversational Competence

It is hypothesized in the present study that stimulating natural conversation is more likely in discussion activities than in interviews, but the discussion activities of three candidates will reduce the power and duties for some candidates than those activities with only two candidates, thus making the task an imbalanced one.The present author collected data for interviews and activities from the oral testing of BEC higher on Nov. 30, 2002, the trial testing guided by herself and the questionnaire before and after the trial testing. As Young (1995) concluded that not only does the interview format not measure conversational competence, it also "obscure discourse difference between learners" (1995: 37). As for interviews, overwhelming dominance or leading of the examiner is shown by the analysis. According to the data from interviews, 96.22% of the topics given by the examiners were accepted by the candidates and the examiners made all the openings and closings, while the whole 16 candidates initiated only 21 new topics and this was five times less than those from the examiners. It is the examiners' responsibility for initiating sequences of talk, and the form of the initiations that give the oral interview its special characteristics as a test genre, which also serves as evidence of the artificiality of the interview tasks. Analysis for the discussion activity in BEC higher suggests that the right and duties are almost equally shared by two candidates. They approximately initiated and ratified the same number of topics in the discussion activity. It is their contribution to the interaction that is counted in their proficiency assessment.At the same time, the trial testing and the questionnaire are to investigate factors related to test types and the assessing power of discussion activity involving three candidates. For the questionnaire survey given to the 41 subjects before the trial testing, over half of the student prefer discussion activity to interview task. And it is also clearly shown in the analysis that when the candidates are to take part in discussion activity involving three candidates their anxiety increased and their task enjoyment degraded. Thus, the present author is justified to doubt the discussion activity involving three candidates when it is to assess conversational competence.The results from this study seem to support the initial hypothesis of the study,namely that discussion activities in language proficiency exams closely resemble conversations, and they, therefore, produce better measures of conversational competence than the interview phase of the exam, though discussion involving three candidates is not an ideal form. But the phase of interview still holds its value as it serves to warm-up the test setting and value some linguistic factors.The present study clearly indicates the difference in the discourse structure of interview and discussion activity tasks; therefore one might rightly ask whether the performance of the candidates varies in the interview phase and the discussion activity. As the scores of the oral tests mainly reflect the fluency and accuracy of the candidate's output as well as their range of vocabulary, no inferences can be made as regards the assessment of conversational competence specifically. But we can say with certain that if the conversational competence is what we want to assess in an oral test, discussion activity tasks involving two candidates are preferable to interview tasks.