Rethinking Assessment of Thai EFL Learners' Speaking Skills

Kemtong Sinwongsuwat
2012 Language Testing in Asia  
Bio Data: Kemtong Sinwongsuwat has a Ph.D. in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been lecturing at Prince of Songkla University for almost five years after her graduation. She currently teaches both undergraduate and graduate students at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and has a special interest in Conversation Analysis (CA), interactional linguistics, corpus linguistics, and the development of Thai EFL learners' oral communication skills. Abstract
more » ... paper reassesses the mainstream tasks used for evaluating Thai ELF learners' speaking skills: face-to-face interview and role-play. Based on final and preliminary findings from small-scale classroom research, it examines the capacity of these two tasks to assess the learners' conversation skills in particular and recommends a task that is more oriented towards features of natural conversation; i.e., nonscripted role-play. It is argued that if implemented with an appropriate rubric, this task should enable us to better assess the students' ability to converse in naturally-occurring communicative situations and with practice make it possible to develop students with better proficiency in English conversation. Some implications are also noted for English conversation teaching stemming from the proposed application of the assessment task in Thai EFL classroom contexts.
doi:10.1186/2229-0443-2-4-75 fatcat:x7wgdv2nn5gzlbj25fwtxkby6q