earticle

영어

Face-to-face interview has been used to elicit language samples in oral proficiency testing. The direct testing is believed to measure more authentic and interactive language ability. However, it is argued that speech samples from unstructured interviews are different from ones in natural communication settings, and that the interviewees are forced to play as passive roles. Furthermore, inexperienced interviewers often allow superficial fluency rewarded. Communicative task (e.g., long-run narrative and descriptive speech) meaningfulness tends to be underestimated. In the unstructured interview situations where intuition driven interviewers do not provide meaningful communicative tasks (or prompts), personality is implicitly focused, and interpersonal strategies are overestimated. When a test intends to assess ‘language’ skills, the nonlanguage skills make test usefulness dubious. This study explores inappropriateness issues of face-to-face English language proficiency interviews in Korea. This study also values the usefulness of semi-direct (tape- or computermediated) speaking tests in terms of task meaningfulness. Samples of superficial fluency collected in testing settings are commented upon. Points of view from Korean contexts are repetitively discussed over the study.