Abstract:

The Test of Self-Perceived Oral Communication Competence (TSOC), originally developed in Spanish as the Test de Competencia Oral Autopercibida (TCOA), is a brief self-report instrument designed to assess students’ perceived oral communication competence. It has been validated for use in secondary education and is conceptually organized into five content facets: Interaction Management (turn-taking and participation), Multimodality and Prosody (voice and non-verbal cues), Textual Coherence and Cohesion (organizing and linking ideas), Argumentative Strategies (building and defending positions), and Lexicon and Terminology (precise, context-appropriate vocabulary). Previous psychometric studies in secondary students have supported both a multifactorial structure with five correlated factors and a bifactor solution in which a general oral competence factor is prominent. In higher education, however, research is more limited and the instrument has been examined only using a unidimensional model.

The present study examines the dimensionality of the TCOA in a sample of 375 university students in education degrees. Participants completed the 22-item version of the TCOA, and we analyzed the internal structure with confirmatory factor analysis for ordinal data, comparing a five-factor correlated model and a bifactor model (a general factor plus five specific factors). We also examined reliability of total and subscale scores.

Results showed that the five-factor model achieved acceptable global fit; however, the latent correlation between the Textual Coherence and Cohesion factor and the Argumentative Strategies factor was extremely high. This pattern is consistent with a strong overarching factor that drives responses across domains and may reduce the interpretability of some subscale distinctions.

The bifactor model showed improved fit. The general oral competence factor accounted for the majority of the common variance and most of the reliability of the total score, whereas the specific factors contributed comparatively little reliable variance beyond the general factor. These findings support interpreting the TCOA as essentially unidimensional in this population and indicate that a single global score can be used without substantially biasing results, even though items were written to reflect specific facets of oral communication.

From an educational perspective, having an instrument that is conceptually multifaceted but psychometrically dominated by a general factor is advantageous. For university teachers, a global TCOA score offers a simple and robust indicator of students’ self-perceived oral competence for improve oral communicative competence in higher education. At the same time, the five factors retain substantive value for item design, teaching feedback, and qualitative interpretation, even if subscale scores should be interpreted with caution.

Keywords:

Oral communication competence, Self-perceived competence, Higher education, Measurement validity.