Abstract:

This mixed-method research study examines students’ speaking of Spanish intermediate language learners with the Virtual Oral Interview Classroom-based Exam (VOICES), and the American Council Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) for assessing their oral ability. Students’ oral proficiency was assessed at the beginning and end of the semester via the OPI, oral performance was assessed during the middle and at the end of the semester with VOICES, which is a free oral assessment tool for students and teachers. During the semester, learners practiced with structured output activities and communicative output activities to increase students’ speaking ability. Using active learning as a pedagogical approach (Felder & Brent, 2009) and reflective practice based on Schön’s principles (1987), Spanish instruction was focused on conscious awareness, scaffolding, autonomous and meaningful communication as a way to improve the performance of oral tasks. The study employs the convergent design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011) that entails the collection of qualitative and quantitative data sets to provide a better understanding of the best practices for teaching and assessing speaking. The qualitative data set includes participants’ verbal data elicited via OPIs and VOICES, focus groups, self-assessments for the OPIs, reflection journals for the OPI and VOICES, teacher’s notes, students’ evaluations, and open-ended questions in an online survey. The quantitative data set consists of participants’ responses to Likert-scale questions in the online survey, and the OPIs and VOICES participants’ scores. The study integrated teacher’s perspectives as well as students’ performance data in the speaking skill to reinforce the validity of the study results. Participants in this study are 13 Spanish learners, who at the time were undergraduate students at a large public university in the Midwest of the United States. All participants were native English speakers and ranged in age from 18 years old to 28 years old, with the median age being 19. They were enrolled in an intermediate Spanish conversation course for professionals. There were 6 female and 7 male participants.

The study answers the questions:
1. What affordances does the use of reflective practice in a Spanish course for the professionals provide for the development of learner speaking skills?
2. What constraints does the use of reflective practice in a Spanish course create for the development of learner speaking skills?
3. After completing the course, do students meet the proficiency speaking level established as the learning objective?

All data were analyzed in the context of the participants’ reflective practice. To determine whether there was a significant difference between the pre-and-post OPIS and the middle and final VOICES tasks t-tests were used. The use of active learning and reflective practice also contributed positively to building a comfortable and engaging learning environment.

References:
[1] Creswell, J.W., & Plano Clark, V.L. (2011). Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. (3rd ed) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Felder, R.M. & Brent, R. (2009). Active learning: An introduction. American Society for Quality Higher Education Brief, 2(4), 1-5.
[2] Schön, D. A. 1987. Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.

Keywords:

Active learning in Spanish, students' reflective practice, speaking performance, speaking proficiency.