Gary J Ockey and Evgeny Chukharev-Hudilainen published an interesting article in Applied Linguistics that suggests a few interesting things. It highlights Ockey’s earlier research that suggests that the asynchronous tasks used in the TOEFL iBT speaking section “may not sufficiently assess interactional competence.”

More importantly, it compares the use of a human interviewer (a la IELTS) to a Speech Delivery System (like a chatbot) to elicit spoken English from test-takers. It seems to suggest that “the computer partner condition was found to be more dependable than the human partner condition for assessing interactional competence.” And that both were equal in areas like pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

Aha! This information could be used to create a better TOEFL test or a better IELTS test. Someone should let the test makers know.

No need, though, as I read at the end that “this research was funded by the ETS under a Committee of Examiners and the Test of English as a Foreign Language research grant.”

Implement it right away, I say.

I mention this now because the research will be presented tomorrow at an event hosted by the University of Melbourne.

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