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Fluency in French project

The Language Testing Research Group conducted an unfunded project to look at perceptions of spoken language proficiency among university teachers of French and their students. The aim was to focus where possible on perceptions of oral fluency, but this proved to be a somewhat difficult concept to define adequately. Audio tape recordings were made of fourth year students of French performing an oral expose in front of their peers (for coursework assessment), and in addition we gathered the tape-recorded comments of their tutor, and the retrospective comments by the students themselves on their performance. We explored student and tutor perceptions of student performance on oral tasks, with a view to identifying common themes and disagreements / misperceptions.

The results were written up in an MA dissertation: Tania Horák (1996) Multiple perspectives on oral proficiency, unpublished MA dissertation, Lancaster University.

The findings of the investigation showed that all the native speakers ranked the students identically according to ability. However the criteria used to reach this decision differed. Despite this, what they had in common was that they were concerned above all with comprehensibility of the intended message, whereas the tutor-assessor tended to focus more on linguistic accuracy and the content. No single criterion to evaluate fluency was used equally by all the informants, nor by the three groups.

Even though no patterns of criteria use were clear, other patterns were. In general terms it seems that the native speakers tended to focus more on the message (e.g. pragmatic effects of mispronunciation). A further criterion reported was irritation level and the mistakes the native speakers did note were the ones that particularly bothered them. On the other hand, the tutor focused almost exclusively on linguistic accuracy and the quality of ideas.

Further information is available from Charles Alderson.