6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 
Assessing productive and interactive skills 
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conveyed in writing ‘
position the document holder to the right of the 
viewer, between the keyboard and the monitor
’
 
might more simply be 
conveyed in interactive speech by ‘
put
that thing over here
’.
In written production, the addresser is usually more distant from the 
addressee both physically (people do not usually write to each other face 
to face) and socially (the writer and reader may never meet and may 
know little or nothing about each other). This places more of a burden on 
the language to convey the message as there is much less scope for referring 
to shared knowledge. Visual features such as punctuation and typeface do 
offer some additional paralinguistic information, but cannot convey as 
much as the pauses, intonational patterns, shifts of pitch and volume, 
gestures and facial expressions that support face-to-face interaction.
The step of physically producing spoken or written output presents 
evident challenges for the language learner. Writing can involve 
grappling with an unfamiliar script, punctuation conventions and 
spelling. Speech involves articulating the different sounds of the foreign 
language, along with stress patterns, systems of intonation and pitch. 
These issues all have the potential to obscure the learner’s intended 
message and impede communication. Features that can be indicative 
of the level of diffi culty a speaker has in articulating their message in a 
foreign language are outlined in 
Table 6.1
. Because they provide 
observable evidence of language processing, features of this kind are 
often refl ected in rating scales used to assess performance.
Table 6.1
 
Features of more and less profi cient speech
Less profi cient speech
More profi cient speech
Shorter and less complex speech units
Longer and more complex (e.g., more 
embedded) speech units
More errors per speech unit
Fewer errors per speech unit
Less and more limited use of cohesive 
markers (and, but, etc.)
More (and more varied) use of cohesive 
markers
Limited to use of common words
Use of more sophisticated and idiomatic 
vocabulary
Pauses linked to language search
Pauses linked to content search
Pauses within grammatical units
Pauses between grammatical units
More silent pause time
Less silent pause time
Shorter stretches of speech between 
noticeable pauses
Longer stretches of speech between 
noticeable pauses
Speed of delivery noticeably below typical 
native speaker rates
Speed of delivery not noticeably below 
typical native speaker rates
Source: based on Luoma (2004), Tonkyn and Wilson (2004) and Hughes (2010)

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