Developing And Validating The Scale Of Navy's Oral English Proficiency

In line with the strategic requirement of “offshore waters defense and open seas protection”,the PLA navy actively participates in such international maritime exchanges and cooperation as disaster rescue,humanitarian assistance,escort missions,and multinational excises,doing their utmost to shoulder more international responsibilities and obligations.The English proficiency of naval personnel has accordingly been identified as a fundamental and indispensable component of combat effectiveness in safeguarding national sovereignty and maritime rights and interests,protecting the security of strategic sea lines of communication and overseas interests,and participating in international maritime cooperation.However,existing research demonstrates that there is still a gap between the practical proficiency of naval personnel and such an objective,especially in oral proficiency.The present research combines study on navy's oral English proficiency(NOEP)with language proficiency scale,with the aim to develop and validate the scale of navy's oral English proficiency,to provide reference and guidance for the education and assessment of naval English,and to provide support for the improvement of personnel's naval English proficiency to effectively accomplish international maritime cooperation and communication.The research takes communicative language ability and situated cognition as the theoretical foundation,and integrates 3 dimensions of situation,language task,as well as knowledge and strategy to develop the indices for assessing NOEP.The research combines top-down approach with empirical study,and adopts intuitive,qualitative,and quantitative analyses in a compensatory and complementary manner.3 questions are to be solved:(1)What are the typical situations in which navy's oral English is in need?(2)What are the indices and levels for the scale of navy's oral English proficiency(NOEP)?(3)How could the scale of NOEP be validated?Based on aforementioned questions,the research firstly analyzes and explores relevant naval English textbooks,and 25 midshipmen are required to participate in a survey and interview to identify typical situations as well as cognitive difficulty to perform language tasks in these situations.Then,18 documents including major language scales,guidelines for language teaching,textbooks,and criteria for language assessment are referred to collect 1357 descriptors for NOEP.In line with the principles of independence,positiveness,definiteness,clarity,and brevity,duplication elimination,deconstruction,recombination,adaption and translation are made to revise descriptors into unified semantic structure and wording style.248 descriptors remain after experts-consultation,which are classified into 9 components and scaled into 6 provisional levels,and the preliminary scale of NOEP is established.Finally,the scale is divided into 16 sub-scales,and 39 naval English teachers are required both to judge the existing classification and to rate each descriptor.9672 responses collected are analyzed with SPSS 23 and Facets 3.8 to validate the scale.Major findings are:(1)38 typical situations in which naval English tasks are performed by officials are identified.In accordance with cognitive difficulty,these situations are further divided into 6 levels,and difficulty increases with the level ranges from 1 to 6.There are 2,3,9,8,10,and 6 situations respectively for corresponding levels.The results of one-way ANOVA demonstrate that there are significant between-group differences among the 6 levels.(2)Navy's oral English proficiency in the research is defined as “the proficiency that enables language learners or users' situated employment of comprehensive cognitive strategies to manage and regulate the use of language knowledge so as to perform naval English tasks”.3 dimensions and 9 components are identified as indices for assessing NOEP.With reference to original level of each descriptor,descriptors for the 9 components are scaled into 6 levels,which make the preliminary scale of NOEP.(3).For validity,intra-rater consistency and inter-rater consistency of the 39 teachers are analyzed with Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test and Chi-square Test respectively,which reveals that there is a statistically significant consistency between the researcher's 2 rounds of classifications,and the majority of teachers agree on the indices established.With regard to reliability,many-facets Rasch analysis is made with the help of Facets,result of which demonstrates:(A).The discriminating power of the scale is about 10,with the separation index of 9.98.(B).No significant bias interaction is identified between rating with gender and experience,and it shows a high consistency among raters' judgments of scaling.(C).Based on measures estimated by the Rash model,descriptors are grouped into 6 levels of equal difficulty-intervals.There are 19,35,50,68,57 and 17 itmes of descriptors for level 1 to 6,and 91.06% of the descriptors share the same level with the preliminary scale of NOEP.The research will contribute to the construction of the framework of navy's language proficiency as well as the development of theoretical study on navy's language proficiency,which will also serve as reference and guideline for naval English related decision-making,status quo investigation,achievement assessment,and objective formulation.Besides,the research proposes a systematic and complete approach for the design,development,and validation of the scale of NOEP,which provides an operable scheme for future studies on the development of language scale.