Swedish School Leavers'
Oral Proficiency in English
Grading of Production &
Analysis of Performance
By Stella Sundh
December 2003
Uppsala University Press
ISBN: 91-554-5681-2
320 pages, Illustrated, 6 ¼" x 8 ¾"
$59.50 Paper Original
This Ph.D. dissertation looks at the testing and grading of Swedish school leavers' oral proficiency in English, and at certain aspects of these students' linguistic competence. The analyses and results are based on material drawn from an assessment project carried out at Gothenburg University in 1993.
The interviewers assigned generally positive but often differing grades to the student performance. The grades were influenced by the students' by occurrences of grammatical errors. The students' use of discourse phenomena and compensatory strategies was also of importance to the grades assigned. The linguistic features studied comprised the verbal group, vocabulary, discourse markers and pronunciation.
Differences could be observed between the members of the three interviewer categories (school teachers of English, university teachers of English and native speakers of English). Furthermore, differences in the grades assigned could be explained, for instance, by the order in which the interviews were made and by some students' hesitant delivery.
Language Studies
Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia No. 123
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