Talking to Score: Impression Management in L2 Oral Assessment and the Co-Construction of a Test Discourse Genre

Abstract

In recent years, the emphasis in second language (L2) oral proficiency assessment has shifted from linguistic accuracy to discourse strategies such as the ability to initiate, respond, and negotiate meaning. This has resulted in a growing interest in the discourse analysis of students' performance in different oral proficiency assessment formats. The study reported in this article represents an attempt to investigate students' discourse performance in L2 oral proficiency assessments conducted in the form of peer group interactions in Hong Kong. Forty-three female Hong Kong secondary students were involved. Findings from a qualitative discourse analysis of the students' interaction data supplemented with data from interviews and a questionnaire reveal the emergence of a test-task specific genre featuring recurrent frames of talk for task management, content delivery, and response giving. These frames were characterized by discourse features that seem to be ritualized, contrived, and colluded. Such interaction practices suggest a strong desire on the part of the students to maintain the impression of being effective interlocutors for scoring purposes rather than for authentic communication. Implications for test construct validity and the impact on the students' L2 oral proficiency development are discussed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The study reported in this article was funded by the internal research grant of the University of Hong Kong. I am deeply grateful for the intellectual support from Professor Suresh Canagarajah and Dr. Greg Myers on earlier versions of the article. I also thank Dr. Diane Hui for helping me refine the data coding. Special thanks go to all the anonymous reviewers and editors of Language Assessment Quarterly for their careful reviews and insightful feedback.

Notes

¹The academic performance of primary graduates in Hong Kong is mainly evaluated based on their school results in Chinese, English, and mathematics.

²Topics of a similar nature were suggested in the SBA assessment guidelines, and teachers were encouraged to adapt from the recommended topics or design their own.

³Six minutes was relatively short, as most other schools would give at least 10 min to a four-member group. The teacher explained that she could not give more time to each group as the class size was big (altogether 43 students).

⁴The SBA guidelines did not recommend the use of a beeper to set time limits for the interactions, but most schools would do it even though some schools told students they did not need to stop immediately when the beeper went off. However, in the present study, all groups stopped when time was up even if they were in the middle of their utterances.

⁵Students were allowed to jot notes on a strip of paper and bring it to the interaction.

⁶ It would be very useful if Student A and her peers were invited to comment on their discourse practices as a common practice to obtain member validation in qualitative research. However, because of practical constraints, I was not able to interview other students apart from the six sampled students.

⁷ This point was also mentioned in the SBA Handbook but not particularly stressed in the assessment criteria. The students may have obtained this idea from their teacher.

⁸The teacher admitted that she was aware of the high scores, but she explained that the students had tried very hard to perform well and their efforts should be rewarded.

⁹It should be noted that apart from reading print texts, students were also encouraged to view movies for SBA tasks. However, most teachers in Hong Kong tend to focus on comprehension of the moral and ideologies of the film and learning vocabulary items from the movies. Communication strategies or discourse pragmatics are seldom the key focuses of the use of audio-visual materials.

¹⁰“Habitus” is a construct developed by Bourdieu (1991) that refers to the dispositions, or a set of patterns of thought, behavior, and taste acquired by individuals based on the social structures (such as class, family, and education) and external conditions (fields) they encounter in their everyday life.