Assessing Oral Proficiency: A UKM Experience

Abstract

The B. A. Integrated English Proficiency course was designed primarily for first year undergraduates to upgrade their general language proficiency so that they could cope with the content courses in the B. A. in English Studies programme. Apart from objectives related to reading and writing, another objective of the course is to equip students with oral communication skills for interacting in everyday situations, hence, the corresponding need to assess oral proficiency. Several assessment procedures have been tried out, including brief oral presentations on given topics and oral interviews with the rater as the interviewer. However, these were found to be generally unsatisfactory because they were not sufficiently communicative: they did not reflect the kind of oral interaction activities and tasks students were involved in while following the English course. More recently, a different testing procedure was developed which takes into account the dynamic, interactive quality of real-life communication. The core of this testing procedure is what we call 'an oral interaction task'.