| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === The aim of this study was to explore the correlations among the four English language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing of Taiwan EFL elementary school students who took placement tests for English ability grouping instruction. If the correlations were high, then the placement tests could omit oral exams to save time and energy, yet still have the similar grouping results.
The participants were 292 incoming sixth graders from a Taipei municipal elementary school. The instrument used was a placement test which included an oral test (assessing speaking skill) and a paper-and-pencil test (assessing listening, reading and writing skills). All of the participants had taken the two tests at the beginning week of their first semester. On the bases of the two testing scores, participants were distributed into three different ability levels, A, B, and C, for their consequent English courses. The statistical measures employed in analyzing the testing scores included Kendall Coefficient of Concordance, Descriptive Statistics, t-test, Pearson Correlation, and Stepwise Multiple Regression Analyses.
The main findings were as follows:
1. There was a highly significant and positive correlation between participants’ oral and paper-and-pencil tests performances.
2. There were highly significant and positive correlations among participants’ four language skills. That is, there were highly significant and positive correlations between each pair of the four language skills.
3. There was a highly significant and positive correlation between participants’ spoken skills (listening and speaking) and written skills (reading and writing).
4. There was a highly significant and positive correlation between participants’ receptive skills (listening and reading) and productive skills (speaking and writing).
5. Comparison between the ability grouping results with or without oral testing scores indicated that omitting the oral test seemed practical because only six out of 292 students (2%) would be attributed to different groups.
6. Gender factor caused significant difference only in reading skills. Female students performed better than that of their male counterparts.
7. Writing scores were the most powerful predictor (91.3%) in students’ overall language performance; the second, reading scores, 6.93%; the third, listening scores, 1.5%; and the last, speaking scores, merely 0.3%.
Finally, based on the findings, pedagogical implications were proposed, and directions for further research were suggested.
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