De Constructie Van Spreektaken In Grootschalig Peilingsonderzoek: Domeinbeschrijving En -Verkaveling

In this article a survey is given of the domain of oracy skills that will be the subject of a periodical repeated nationwide assessment study.The domain for the assessment of eleven-year-old pupils is restricted by two principles.a. The assessment includes communicative behaviour in testing situations which approach every day situations (school as well as non-school) that pupils of that age might find themselves in.b. The description of the skills will be given in so-called 'curricular significant units', units that are recognized by teachers as teachable units.The internal structure of the domain is dominated by two dimensions: the dimension of language functions and the dimension of skills. The dimension of language functions is restricted to transactional language. Distinctions are made between informative (reporting and expository) and conative (regulative and argumentative) subfunctions. These four subfunctions are used as classification units for speech acts. The speech functions and acts are the gists of language situations, generated and formulated by assessors and relevant respondents from various fields. In the dimension of oracy skills, five skills are distinguished:a. to select the information from the available information in the tasks and context;b. to arrange the information in an audible manner;c. to interact with listeners or other participants on the level of content (providing a context for instance) and relationship (termtaking);d. to formulate correctly and fluently;e. to use channel specific features approppriately: volume, tempo, pronunciation, etc.When these two dimensions are crossed, the matrix of curricular significant units is created. For each of the four language functions from three up to six tasks are constructed. Rating will be done via analytical schemes for each skill and by wholistic judgement by trained raters.