Construction Of Business English Speaking Proficiency Scale From The Perspective Of Interactionalist Construct

In recent years,the research of Business English in China has been developing rapidly,and so has the teaching and testing of Business English,which also indicates the importance and necessity of establishing a unified Business English proficiency scale.English speaking proficiency,as a part of Business English proficiency,has been paid more and more attention in business communication.Given of this,based on the interactionalist construct theory proposed by Chapelle,this study constructs a theoretical framework of Business English speaking proficiency and preliminarily develops Chinese college students’ Business English speaking proficiency scale.This study attempts to construct an open scale of Business English speaking proficiency in accordance with Chinese characteristics.Compared with the traditional language proficiency scale,this study is based on the measurement of spoken English in the field of ESP,and mainly adopts the methods of questionnaire survey,interview and statistical analysis to develop and verify the scale.The content of the research mainly includes the following aspects: First,constructing the description framework of students’ Business English speaking proficiency;Second,establishing the Business English speaking proficiency description corpus and generating a students’ selfassessment questionnaire;Thirdly,analyzing student questionnaire data by using Rasch software;Fourthly,creating the final Business English spoking proficiency scale through validity verification.Through a preliminary study,this study deletes 8 non-fitting descriptors,and finally obtains 106 descriptors,which constitute 15 subscales to describe the business English speaking proficiency.According to the results of the data analysis,this study finds that these descriptors can be divided into three consecutive levels to describe the business English speaking proficiency,among which 32 descriptors are classified as advanced,49 as intermediate and 25 as lower intermediate.At the same time,this study also notes that the influence of contextual factors on language proficiency is scalable,which supports the foothold of this study,that is,language learners’ factors and language environment factors can have an impact on their language competence.This study is an exploratory study on the development of the Business English Scale.It is hoped that this scale will have some reference significance for promoting the development,teaching and examination of Business English in China.