cognitive attention to ensure grammatical agreements. She seemed to favor fluency at the expense of complexity and accuracy. Patrick seemed to compensate for his relatively low accuracy by using an impressive range of grammatical structures and vocabulary which enabled him to address all three criteria adequately. As suggested by the lack of flexible use of these impressive sentences when caught by an unexpected topic, it is not clear whether this diversity reflected actual proficiency level or a more mechanistic approach to language learning involving some level of rote-learned material. Nevertheless, Patrick’ s performance was superior to that of Olivia’ s and suggested excellent preparation in the lead up to the oral examination.
At the dawn of the implementation of a new national curriculum for languages( ACARA, 2011), it is perhaps important to reflect on the impact of assessment tasks on our students’ performance and on the overuse of an exemplar-based system as a strategy to cope with face-to-face interaction. In particular, the language curriculum reform is a timely opportunity to revisit the now ubiquitous notion of a communicative approach to language learning that informs the format of this oral examination. As mentioned before, the assumptions seem to be that the high level of topic familiarity involved in this‘ conversation’ is a means of fostering fluency and confidence. However, in line with Robinson’ s hypothesis( 2001) one could also argue that these topics are not sufficiently complex to stretch the learners’ linguistic repertoire. It is important to note that Patrick’ s superior performance is not due to the originality of content per se, but to his ability to use a range of structures and vocabulary to dress up a content similar to that of Olivia’ s. This requires intense preparation and an excellent understanding of all three assessment criteria so that sufficient breadth and depth in relation to content and language can be generated during the interaction. Perhaps now is a good time to reflect on the pedagogical and linguistic value of the inclusion of such topics in the final oral assessment, at least for the European languages.
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Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. 2011. Draft shape of the Australian Curriculum: Languages. Sydney: ACARA.
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Diane de Saint Léger is Associate Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include motivation and anxiety in L2 learning, L2 reading and writing skills development and learners’ perception and beliefs of L2 learning. Over the years, she has been actively involved in the professional development of Modern language Teachers in Victoria and has run numerous workshops and seminars spanning a wide range of themes and topics.
Dr Neomy Storch is a senior lecturer in ESL and Applied Linguistics at the School of Languages and Linguistics, the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research has focused on issues related to second language pedagogy. These issues have included second language writing development, feedback and revision in second language writing, the nature of peer collaboration, and the role of first language in second language classes.
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