Reading Corpus

Brian Richards Department of Arts and Humanities in Education University of Reading b.j.richards@reading.ac.uk website

Citation information

Chambers, F., & Richards, B. J. (1995). The 'free conversation' and the assessment of oral proficiency. Language Learning, 11, 6-10.

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by the above reference.

Additional publications referencing these data:

Malvern, D. D., & Richards, B. J. (2002). Investigating accommodation in language proficiency interviews using a new measure of lexical diversity. Language Testing, 19, 85-104.

Richards, B. J., & Chambers, F. (1996). Reliability and validity in the GCSE oral examination. Language Learning Journal, 14, 28-34.

Richards, B. J., & Malvern, D. (2000). Accommodation in oral interviews between foreign language learners and teachers who are not native speakers. Studia Linguistica, 54, 260-271.

Project Description

These data on French foreign language oral interviews were transcribed as part of a study of the reliability and validity of oral assessment in modern foreign languages in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). GCSE is a public examination normally taken by school children in the United Kingdom at the age of 16, i.e. after the 11 years of compulsory schooling. The 34 interviews constitute one part of the French oral examination: the so-called “free conversation.” Here, the French teacher interviews students about everyday topics such as school, home, family, holidays, future aspirations and hobbies, and interests. Other parts of the oral examination such as role-plays are not part of these data. The title of the project was “Oral Assessment in Modern Languages Project”, funded by the Research Endowment Trust Fund of the University of Reading.

Our analyses have compared lexical and grammatical features of the children’s language with teachers’ expectations of foreign language learners of this age, and with the language of French native speakers in a similar interview setting (Chambers & Richards, 1995). We have also compared teachers’ impressionistic assessments of the presence of qualities specified in the assessment criteria with our own objective counts using the CLAN software (Richards & Chambers, 1996). We are currently looking at teacher-student interaction, focusing on the teachers’ accommodation strategies.

Teachers conduct the oral examinations, including the interviews on set dates and on topics determined by the official examination board. Only one teacher and one student are present during each interview, the audio recording being made by the teacher. The teacher enters assessments on a mark sheet during the interview, and on completion of the examination the tapes and mark sheets are sent to the examination board. A sample of tapes is remarked by a moderator appointed by the examination board and the teachers’ assessments adjusted if necessary. The average length of the interviews is 5 minutes 30 seconds. They range from 3 minutes to 12 minutes.

Participants

All 34 participants come from the same all-ability secondary school (11-18 comprehensive school) in an English-speaking area of South Wales. They are 16 years old and are native speakers of English who have been learning French for 5 years. All have also spent at least one year learning Welsh and some have had the opportunity to learn German.

The school is situated in a predominantly working-class area, but the students selected here cover a wide range of social background. It should be noted that students with the weakest performance in French were excluded from this sample because the focus of our study was the Higher Level examination. This part of the examination, which is taken in addition to Basic Level, gives students access to the highest grades. Students in the sample obtained pass grades ranging from Grade A (the highest) to Grade E. No students with Grades F and G were included.

Two teachers, one female and one male, are involved in the conduct of the interviews. Neither are native speakers of French; both are native speakers of British English who have learned French as a foreign language and have a degree in Modern Languages.

As a condition of using the school’s tapes we promised that the identity of the school, teachers, and students would not be revealed. We have therefore used pseudonyms for these. In addition, we have changed the names of all locations mentioned on the tapes, as well as names of sports teams, and exchange schools in France and Germany. Francine Chambers who is a native speaker of French transcribed the recordings and subsequently checked the transcripts edited and coded by Brian Richards. Fiona Richards did the final checking.

The following points should be noted:

• In transcribing the French language we have followed the CHILDES manual (sections 4.5.14 and 27.4.1) in dealing with apostrophes and hyphens: apostrophes are followed by a space (l’ aim, c’ est); hyphens in compounds are replaced by a plus sign (le week+end); dashes between words (est-ce que) are replaced by spaces (est ce que).
• It is difficult to draw a line between an English accent and a pronunciation error; because an assessment criterion of the GCSE examination is whether an utterance would be comprehensible to a “sympathetic native speaker,” only those student errors that were serious enough to cause a breakdown of communication, or which were followed by a teacher correction, were coded. These were transcribed in UNIBET on the %err tier.
• Some students answer questions in English or insert English words. Where the whole utterance is in English, a separate speaker tier for the student (*STE) has been created. English words inserted in French are marked with the @e suffix (father@e). Students who are also learning German sometimes use German words. These are marked with a @g suffix. Both the @e and @g symbols are contained in the 00DEPADD file.
• Other additions to the 00DEPADD file are: +//? (self-interruption of a question) and +..? (question tailing off).
• Acknowledgment tokens have been coded as back channels and are marked [+ bch]. These can be excluded from MLU and MLT counts using the -s”[+ bch]” switch.
• The exclamations and interactional markers used are: “aah,” “euh,” “mm,” and “um.” To omit these from analyses they can be placed in an exclude file.

List of Files

In the table below, the fourth column shows the combined total of points obtained by each student for the tests in Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing in the GCSE examination. A maximum of 7 points is awarded for each of these 4 skills, giving a possible total of 28 points. The fifth column shows the score for the whole oral test, including the interview and role-plays.

File number	Sex	Teacher Sex	GCSE Points	Oral Test
W01.cha	male	male	19	4
W02.cha	male	male	17	3
W03.cha	female	female	16	2
W04.cha	female	female	11	3
W05.cha	female	male	16	4
W06.cha	male	male	19	4
W07.cha	male	male	18	4
W08.cha	female	male	22	5
W09.cha	male	male	15	4
W10.cha	female	female	14	3
W11.cha	female	male	20	4
W12.cha	male	male	17	4
W13.cha	male	female	12	2
W14.cha	male	male	12	3
W15.cha	male	male	19	4
W16.cha	female	female	11	2
W17.cha	male	female	16	4
W18.cha	female	male	23	6
W19.cha	male	male	23	6
W20.cha	male	female	12	2
W21.cha	male	male	19	5
W22.cha	female	female	10	2
W23.cha	female	male	20	4
W24.cha	male	male	17	4
W25.cha	female	male	21	5
W26.cha	female	male	14	4
W27.cha	female	male	21	5
W28.cha	female	male	21	5
W29.cha	male	male	21	4
W30.cha	female	female	16	3
W31.cha	male	male	24	6
W32.cha	female	male	25	6
W33.cha	male	male	8	7
W34.cha	female	male	26	6