Crude contours: a pilot study into the feasibility of charting student speakers’ proficiency
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Abstract
Dutch students of English at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands are believed to enter university at CEFR B2 and, on graduation, are expected to have reached CEFR C2 in reading, writing, listening, spoken production and interaction. There is, however, preciously little evidence that links students’ proficiency to the actual CEFR. This is hardly surprising as the difficulties of linking language users’ production to specific CEFR levels are well-known. The English department does not really systematically chart students’ progress in language proficiency, so that no documentation of the development of students’ language production is available.
As a first attempt at finding out whether or not it is possible to measure students’ progress in spoken English over the first two years of their degree course objectively, a small pilot study of a corpus of spoken English was undertaken. The participants were 31 students from a single cohort who were recorded in their first week at university and at the end of their first and second year. On all occasions they were asked to respond to a set of written general questions, such as “have you read a good book lately?”.