Chow Fong Yee, Dr Fan Jing Hua

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Abstract

The paper is based on a school-based research project, which in turned was based on the Oral Proficiency Diagnostic Tool (OPDT) developed for the Primary 1 students in Singapore. In the OPDT rubrics, oral Chinese proficiency shown in students' pair or group oral activities is diagnostically assessed with eight descriptors categorized into linguistic and communicative competence. After the analysis of the assessment, oral interactive activities are designed from the perspective of structured input to target at the students' weak areas. During the one-year research, pre- and post-tests as well as classroom observations with audio-video recordings are taken for both the experimental and control classes. In both experimental and control classes, sentence structure is assumed to be the focus of oral activities, but the activity design for experimental class targets at the prevention and correction of errors and interactive abilities. The two examples of the intervention to be analyzed in this paper are the word order in a sentence structure and the turn-taking in a dialogue. The qualitative comparative analysis of the results shows that structured input as an intervention method can improve the quality of output in terms of both errors and interactive ability. The paper will also demonstrate how individual activities targeted at specific abilities may fit into a framework of progressive abilities.

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Keyword(s) : Oral Proficiency; diagnosis; error; targeted teaching; word order; interactional competence