On the Establishment of the Oral Chinese Testing System
3.1 System Overview
The oral examination system is essentially a semi-direct oral examination system that emphasizes the communicative language ability and level students have acquired in real-life situations. The test uses paper for writing, including questions, and an interview survey method for textual content. Answers are recorded on blank tapes, and all candidates' answers should be recorded on tape. The total examination time is 20 minutes. Under the papers, the examinee may use 10 minutes according to the topic request to prepare a written test outline and answer questions as reference; formal recording tests last 10 minutes, during which the entire process involves the examinee facing the tape independently.
This measurement system has the following advantages:
(1) It conforms to standardized test requirements with unified exams and times, ensuring examination fairness.
(2) Oral expression in communication is fleeting, but recording serves as a spoken language paper, providing an objective basis for scoring and making collective marking more feasible.
(3) It saves time and manpower.
3.2 Exam Mode Questions
The mode is divided into two parts:
(1) Reading: Read aloud a passage of about 250 words from declarative corpora, containing HSK and B category words primarily, supplemented by C lexical (Class C word proportion less than 20% compared to the first two types). The corpus can adopt modern vernacular Chinese from junior middle school textbooks or simple news/reading passages from local newspapers. The selected corpus should contain varied sentences, be close to life, and take approximately 2 minutes.
(2) Answering Questions: Answer 2 questions, the first being an introduction or descriptive question, the second a commentary or explanatory one, mainly examining the use of language ability in oral expression. Propositions should be familiar to the majority of candidates, not too long or difficult, and avoid overly professional content. This section takes about 3 minutes.
3.3 Examination Standards
Questions are divided into five levels:
Level 1 Standard: Expresses certain ideas but in a messy way. Many pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary usage mistakes seriously affect communication.
Level 2: Basic expression of ideas, but content is insufficient. Vocabulary is limited and often incorrect. More errors in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary usage often affect communication.
Level 3: Content is complete, tone of voice is basically correct, can clearly express ideas. Vocabulary is rich but sometimes incorrect. Language is fluent but inappropriate speech pauses occur more frequently. There are several phonological and grammar mistakes but they do not significantly affect communication.
Level 4: Content is full, rich, and uses the right words. The tone of voice is better, tone is not stiff, expression is fluent and decent, but there are no appropriate speech pauses. Grammatical structure is basically clear, individual voice and grammar mistakes exist but do not affect communication.
Level 5: Content can fluently express ideas using pure Mandarin with a natural tone. Rich vocabulary, appropriate usage, comparing imagery vividly describes things. Natural tone, clear syntax structure, can skillfully use commonly spoken sentences and transform sentences according to communicative needs. Very few grammatical errors that do not affect communication.
Teachers can use this examination system to evaluate school life-related language abilities, reflecting the combination of limited testing and active language ability examinations, which helps comprehensively identify students.
4. Two Sets of Testing System Reliability Verification
Reliability of proposition refers to a test's reliability and stability degree, an important index for assessing the quality of standardized tests. Oral exam reliability mainly depends on marking error scores. Therefore, after creating two sets of questions, one can choose 1~2 HSK level achievements respectively for 3~5 grades (elementary level) for 20 students, 6~8 (average) for 60 students, and 9~11 (advanced level) for 20 students, totaling 100 students, to conduct repeated testing, evaluating difficulty and discrimination levels to enhance scientific examination questions.
In summary, establishing this language testing system helps better guide language teaching. Through test result information feedback, one can clearly understand the strengths and inadequacies of language teaching, thus continuously summarizing experience to improve teaching levels and achieve teaching aims. Currently, large-scale standardized tests in language research are still in their initial stages, with many issues requiring further in-depth study. Strengthening the scientific level of language surveys and efforts to reduce scoring errors will be our constant exploration subject.