Gan Zhengdong Department of English The Hong Kong Institute of Education

1. Quality of language and type of task: grammatical complexity of learners’ language in two oral assessment tasks Gan Zhengdong Department of English The Hong Kong Institute of Education

2. Research context Understanding the effects of assessment tasks on test performance and how test-takers interact with these tasks is…. the most pressing issue facing language performance assessment (Bachman, 2002: 471) Theoretical background Narratives tend to create a need for careful use of nominal reference (Brown and Yule, 1983). Monologues can lead speakers to work to maintain extended turns

3. “Different tasks differentially engaged comprehension and production processes; and that one task constrained the use of certain cognitive and strategic processes in ways in which the other task did not” (Swain, 2001:297)

4. (Skehan, 1998)

5. Three complexity-related empirical studies • Halleck 1995 studies the relationship between holistic ratings of proficiency level (Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior) with objective measures of syntactic maturity for three separate interview tasks (Describing/Narrating, Role Playing, and Asking Questions). He found significant main effects for proficiency level and interview task. Although he found a significant difference in the syntactic measures between Superior- and Advanced-level subjects and between Superior- and Intermediate-level subjects, he found no significant differences in the syntactic measures between Advanced- and Intermediate-level subjects. He also noticed the Describing/ Narrating task subjects obtained higher scores than they did for the other two tasks.

6. Iwashita (2006) examined how syntactic complexity measures relate to oral proficiency in Japanese as a foreign language. She analyzed speech samples from three narrative tasks from 33 learners of Japanese using a variety of syntactic measures in an attempt to find the most valid and reliable measure of syntactic complexity in the context of oral Japanese language. She found that the length of T-units and the number of clauses per T-unit were the best way to predict learner proficiency.

7. Bygate (1999) examined the grammatical patterns of learner language on two types of unscripted task – an argument task and a narrative task. Narrative tasks elicited significantly more words more per T-unit; but there were significantly more verb groups in the argumentation tasks; the argumentation task also generated significantly greater use of the formulaic expression ‘I think’(the higher ‘verb phrase’ score is partly achieved through the high use of formulaic expressions).

8. Defining complexity “Complexity is traditionally measured by examining the extent to which a learner employs subordination, the assumption being that the more subordination used the more complex the language produced (Ellis and Barkhuizen, 2005)

9. In summary, then, we are interested to know: Do the types of discourse promoted by monologic presentation and dialogic interaction lead the learners into working differently with the grammar of the target language?

10. Analysis of the data Coding the data Following the previous empirical studies, we adopted the following production units when we segmented the data. The production units that were used to measure grammatical complexityin this study are words, clauses, T-units.

11. Results TABLE 1Comparison of grammatical complexity measures in the two tasks Discussion Presentation N M SD N M SD FP L of T-unit 30 10.667 2.145 30 13.075 2.142 22.648 .000 C per T-unit 30 1.599 .242 30 1.562 .251 .448 .509 D clause ratio 30 .339 .084 30 .307 .085 3.681 .065 V phrase ratio 30 .290 .171 30 .612 .217 43.908 .000 MLU 30 20.000 5.15 30 26.444 5.882 21.915 .000

12. The four major domains of English language performance Domain 1: Pronunciation and Delivery Pronunciation comprises phonology and intonation. Phonology includes the articulation of individual sounds and sound clusters, whereas intonation refers to the flow of words with appropriate stress and rise/fall across the sentence(s). Delivery is made up of two important subaspects: voice projection and fluency. Fluency refers to the naturalness and the intelligibility of a person’s speech. Domain 2: Communication Strategies Communicative strategies involve body language, timing, and asking and answering appropriate kinds of questions. Body language includes gaze, facial expressions, head movement, and body direction—the more students rely on notes or memorized material, the weaker their body language is likely to be. Timing is important; if student takes too long for an individual presentation the audience may get bored; if the student is too brief, she or he will not be able to give enough ideas or support.

13. Domain 3: Vocabulary and Language Patterns The vocabulary and language patterns domain consists of three important areas: vocabulary and language patterns (including the quantity, range, accuracy, and appropriacy), and self-correction/reformulation. Domain 4: Ideas and Organisation The ideas and organisation domain consists of the expression of information and ideas, the elaboration of appropriate aspects of the topic, organisation, and questioning and responding to questions. Organisation works differently in individual presentations and in group interactions. In a group interaction students share the responsibility for providing enough ideas and information to carry the dialogue forward. They need to stay focused on the topic and say something at the right time to move the conversation forward by elaborating on a point another group member has made or by bringing up a new but relevant point. This kind of organizing is much harder to do in spoken than in written language, so in F4 and F5 group interactions it is not emphasised very much. However, in an individual presentation the speaker has sole responsibility for planning what she or he will say and how, and each student is expected to have thought how to organise what he or she will say.

14. Iwashita et al. (2008) noticed the greater number of clauses and T-units produced at the higher levels, “which contrasts with the lower levels. This difference is, however, cancelled out when ratios are used. ……As the level goes up, the number of T-units and clauses also increases, but the ratio does not increase accordingly.

15. Douglas and Selinker (1992, 1993) and Douglas (1994) that speakers may produce qualitatively quite different performances and yet receive similar ratings as a result of the complexity of the configuration of components in any overall judgment of proficiency.