Korean university students' attitudes to, and performance on, a face-to-face interview (FTFI) and a computer administered oral test (CAOT)

• Main Author: Joo, Mi-jin
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2008
• Subjects: 378.1
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.535082

This study intensely investigated Korean university students' attitudes to a Face-to-Face Interview (FTFI) and a Computer Administered Oral Test (CAOT) first and then their performance on the tests, and finally their effects on performance on the two tests in a Korean university context. The 42 university students participating in the study took part in both the FTFI and the CAOT. After these tests, they completed a questionnaire about their attitudes towards and their perceptions of the tests. Ten of them were interviewed after the questionnaire to understand more deeply their attitudes and performance. Their performance on the two tests was examined using Multi-Faceted Rasch Analysis. The results of this study indicated that Korean university students showed much more favorable attitudes to the CAOT compared with previous studies on direct and semidirect tests, but they still preferred the FTFI to the CAOT in spite of significant negative attitudes to the FTFI with respect to aspects such as nervousness, preparation time, and tiredness. In terms of performance, Korean university students generally had low speaking abilities, but their speaking ability could still be discriminated well by the Rasch model. Their performance was assumed to be affected by many other intervening factors, but the findings suggested that their performance was not influenced by factors such as test order, bias between raters and test formats, computer familiarity, gender or age differences; however, there was an effect for the severity between raters. The students preferred the FTFI overall, but the study also showed that the FTFI was more difficult than the CAOT, indicating a test format effect on performance. Finally, the results of the analyses using the ability estimates and compensating for rater severity indicate that the students' attitudes about the FTFI were associated with their performance on the FTFI, while there was no relationship between their attitudes to the CAOT and performance on the CAOT. The students performed better on the FTFI when they had more positive and less negative attitudes toward the FTFI. That is, this study indicates that Korean university students' attitudes to the FTFI could be important sources of construct irrelevant variance on their speaking test performance on the FTFI. Based on all the findings of this study, I conclude that the use of the CAOT should be considered by teachers and administrators in Korea. The CAOT may be useful for the assessment of achievement during or at the end of the course, or as an alternative test method, in the situation where it is needed to test students' overall oral ability, but hard to conduct the FTFI, especially due to its impracticality (e.g., the lack of skillful teachers and a large number of students).