Part
II
Once the linguistic message has been articulated, both speakers
and writers have opportunities to monitor and, if necessary, revise
what they have said or written. Writers have the chance to do this
before sharing their texts with others. Speakers engaging in interaction
have much more limited time for their self-monitoring, but are more
likely to receive immediate feedback (perhaps by noticing their own
slips, or from questions or confused facial expressions from their
conversational partners) indicating that communication has failed
and that they need to reformulate the message. Monitoring and
revision can occur at the local levels of spelling, pronunciation,
punctuation and grammar. They may involve organisation of the
overall utterance or text, levels of formality, text structure, stylistic
elegance and the effects on the audience. In the course of composing
a text or participating in interaction, addressers may modify or even
abandon their original goals.
Learners are often categorised according to how they monitor and
revise their speech. Some prioritise local accuracy. As a result, they
tend to speak relatively hesitantly, concentrating on grammatical
formulation and pausing frequently to plan or to correct themselves.
Others prioritise fl uency, sacrifi cing a degree of accuracy to maintain
the fl ow of speech. Both strategies have benefi ts and costs for the
learner and can cause strain on the addressee. Assessment designers
need to decide how best to take account of such choices when scoring
performance (Fulcher, 2003).
A longstanding criticism of process models of language is that they
tend to focus rather narrowly on how messages are transmitted
between individuals without paying suffi cient attention to the social
constraints and conventions that govern when it is appropriate to
speak (or write) and the impact of these upon meaning. By focusing on
the individual mechanisms of language processing, they downplay the
shared nature of communication. As Luoma (2004) expressed it, they
are concerned with
speech
, the product of the individual, rather than
with
talk
as a shared social activity. He and Young (1998) argued that
the social nature of talk raises questions about the validity of interactive
speaking tests. Scores are awarded to the individual assessee, but talk
is a product of shared interaction.
A further challenge for assessment designers is that the meaning of
any sentence or speech unit is not universal, but can be radically
modifi ed by context. An utterance such as ‘
Good evening, madam
’,
even if spoken with identical intonation, has a very different implication
when it is said by a hotel receptionist greeting a guest at 6 pm than
when it is said by a mother to rebuke her teenage daughter for waking
up late in the morning. It can be imagined that the expected response
would also be quite different in each case. Each utterance conveys
something about the relationship between the participants. The
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