Validity of Role Play in Sociocultural Competence Assessment in Year 12 Examination in Latvia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.05.2015.04Keywords:
assessment, role play, content analysis, sociocultural competence, intercultural competence, multicultural competence, transcultural competence, construct validity, curricular validity, content validity, face validity, reliability, curricular validationAbstract
The article examines different facets of the role play task, its application in the Year 12 English language examination and the statistical analysis of its results with the purpose to validate the use of role play for testing the sociocultural competence in Latvia. The research method of the role play here combines the features of external validation (construct validation) with internal validation (contents and response validation). The statistical findings suggest that the role-play task ensures a reliable and valid method of assessment of the student performance; it also provides a means for reliable assessment of a large proportion of the curriculum, as the skills tested by role play differ from the skills tested by other examination tasks. The findings of the curricular validation suggest that removing role-play from the examination would undermine the curricular validity of the Year 12 examination. The contents analysis of the task suggests that the difference in the student performance level in Speaking is created by the impact of the assessment of the sociocultural competence as defined by Celce Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995).
References
Cartwright, B. Y. and. Shuqiang Zhang, J. D. (2008) Assessing multicultural competence: perceived versus demonstrated performance. Journal of Counselling and Development, 86 (3): 318–322.
Byram, M. (1997) Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Byram, M. (2008) From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship. Essays and Reflections. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Canale, M. and Swain, M. (1980) Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1(1): 1–47.
Celce Murcia, M., Dörnyei, Z. and Thurrell, S. (1995) Communicative competence: A pedagogically motivated model with content specifications. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 6 (2): 5–35.
Davies, A., Brown, A., Elder, C., Hill, K., Lumley, T. and McNamara, T. (1999) Dictionary of Language Testing. Cambridge University Press.
May, L. A. (2010) Developing speaking assessment tasks to reflect the ‘social turn’ in language testing. University of Sydney Papers in TESOL, 5: 1–30.
Tamcke, M., De Jong, J. and Klein, L. (eds.) (2013) Europe – Space for Transcultural Existence. Gottinger: Universitäts Verlag.
Thorne, S. L. (2008) Transcultural communication in open Internet environments and massively multiplayer online games (pp. 305–327). In S. Magnan (ed.) Mediating Discourse Online. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.
Van Ek, J. A. and Trim, J. L. (2001) Vantage. Cambridge University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1986) Thought and Language. Cambridge. MA: The MIT Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
