237 / 2018-08-30 01:51:52

Applying CSELA to the Self-assessment of Learners’ Speaking Ability

China's Standard of English, Self-assessment, Speaking Ability

全体主题 > 语言能力标准在教学和测试中的应用

The present study aims to explore the pracicality,potential difficulty and the sources of difficulty when senior English majors apply CSELA to self-assess their speaking ability. Altogether 96 students from three different English majors (English, Interpreting&Translation and Business English) were invited to take part. According to their TEM4 results, students were divided into four groups. By using the speaking ability self-assessment scale, they judged whether they can, are uncertain or cannot perform the task described in the descriptors. Considering the English level of the students, 16 descriptors from 4 bands (Band Five, Band Six, Band Seven and Band Eight) were chosen and used as the self-assessment questionaire. Descriptive analysis shows that the percentage of the number of students choosing “cannot” increased as a certain band went up, while the percentage of the number of students choosing “can” descreased as a certain band went up, indicating that students can validly use such a scale to self-assess their own speaking ability. Rasch analysis shows that the logit value for higher-level descriptors is larger, while logit value for lower-level descriptors is smaller. However, it was found that the disctinction of certain descriptors from different bands is not clear. The interview with 10 students found out students were uncertain about whether they can perform certain tasks in the descriptors just because they hadn’t done those tasks during their learning experience.
This research on the one hand can provide some feedback for future scale improvement, one the other hand it can also give some advice to teachers: 1) in the teaching experience, they should create situational conditions for students to use English in different tasks 2) teahcers may know better how to help and train students when they use the scale as a self-assessment instrument.