Critical Linguistic Measurements of EFL Oral Proficiency by Korean Adults in Dialogic and Monologic Tasks

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between EFL Korean adult learners’ oral proficiency achievements and linguistic measurements in dialogic and monologic tasks. To determine which linguistic measurements are practically helpful for identifying L2 learners’ oral proficiency, the researcher collected speech data from 57 Korean college students in Korea and examined the linguistic features that teachers find to be relatively easily manageable. Using statistical analyses, the study found significant differences between the two tasks in terms of English oral proficiency, number of clause types, number of errors per 100 words, word type counts, type-token ratios, and number of word tokens per minute. In addition, the two highest correlations with English oral proficiency for the dialogic task were found for word type counts and number of error-free verb phrases (VPs). For the monologic task, they were number of word tokens per minute and number of error-free VPs. Considering the results, the study proposes pairs of linguistic measurements for each type of task that are more appropriate for examining the oral proficiency of English as foreign language learners in classroom settings. The results may also help testing developers for EFL speech determine more balanced weights among critical linguistic measurements.