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Validating the revised Test of Spoken
English against a criterion of
communicative success
Donald E. Powers, Mary A. Schedl and Susan Wilson Leung
Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ and Frances A.
Butler

代写留学生作业https://www.51lunwen.org/liuxuezuoyedx/University of California, Los Angeles, CA
A communicative competence orientation was taken to study the validity of testscoreinferences derived from the revised Test of Spoken English (TSE). Toimplement the approach, a sample of undergraduate students, primarilynativespeakers of English, provided a variety of reactions to, and judgementsof, thetest responses of a sample of TSE examinees. The TSE scores of these examinees,previously determined by official TSE raters, spanned the full range of TSE scorelevels. Undergraduate students were selected as ‘evaluators’ because they, more
than most other groups, are likely to interact with TSE examinees, many of whombecome teaching assistants.Student evaluations were captured by devising and administering a secondarylistening test (SLT) to assess students’ understanding of TSE examinees’ speech,as represented by their taped responses to tasks on the TSE. The objective was to
determine the degree to which official TSE scores are predictive of listeners’
ability to understand the messages conveyed by TSE examinees. Analyses revealed
a strong association between TSE score levels and the judgements, reactions and
understanding of listeners. This finding applied to all TSE tasks and to nearly all
of the several different kinds of evaluations made by listeners. Along with other
information, the evidence gathered here should help the TSE program meet professional
standards for test validation. The procedures may also prove useful in
future test-development efforts as a way of determining the difficulty of speakingtasks (and possibly writing tasks).
I IntroductionThe Test of Spoken English (TSE) is a measure of the oral languageproficiency of non-native speakers of English. Its primary intendeduses are
1) screening graduate teaching assistants; and
Address for correspondence: Donald E. Powers, Principal Research Scientist, Educational TestingService, Mail Stop 17-R, Rosedale Road, Princeton, NJ 08541, USA; e-mail: dpowersects.
orgLanguage Testing 1999 16 (4) 399–425 0265-5322(99)LT179OA Ó 1999 Arnold400 Validating the revised Test of Spoken English
2) certifying the speaking ability of medical and allied health professionals.
The original items in the TSE were selected from a variety of
potential item types, largely on the basis of their correlations with the
total score on the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) interview. The goal
was to include items having high correlations with FSI scores and,
to the extent possible, low correlations with TOEFL scores.
Recently, the TSE was revised so that it would better reflect current
views of language acquisition and testing, specifically modern notions
about communicative competence. In particular, three of the seven
original sections of the test were deleted. These sections required
examinees to read aloud, to complete sentences and to answer questions
about a single picture. They were considered to be the least
communicatively oriented portions of the test and, thus, less widely
accepted as measuring oral proficiency. More communicative rationales
for developing the test and for rating speech samples were also
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