Oral Proficiency Rater Training: Training Template

Providing effective oral proficiency rater training is a pressing need for language training programs worldwide. Relevant research literature has identified that current oral proficiency rater training methods fail to significantly reduce rater variability (Huot, 1990; Lumley & McNamara, 1995; Lunz & Stahl, 1991; Weigle, 1998), struggle to produce consistent skill persistence (Brown, 1995; Lumley & McNamara, 1995; Lunz & Stahl, 1990), fall short in producing high levels of perfect agreement with the target score (Carlson & Smith-Howell, 1995), and uniformly have arduous time and cost requirements. While research has shown that current rater training programs are fraught with difficulties, little has been done to develop better training methods. This project seeks to develop a new oral proficiency rater training methodology in template form. The goals of this new methodology were to create a rater training program that required minimal time and monetary commitments, which could be adapted to meet the specific objectives, curriculum and testing materials of any language program and that would result in training raters who demonstrated high levels of accuracy, consistency and skill persistence. The methodology is based on research derived principles of effective rater training distilled from evaluations of existing training programs (Chalhoub-Deville, 1995; Douglas & Smith, 1997; Hamilton, Reddel & Spratt, 2001; Merion, 1998; Novak & Gowin, 1984; PapaJohn, 2002; Weigle, 1994), and principles gleaned from research in the disciplines of human cognition and memory (Mount & Thompson, 1987; Srull & Wyer, 1989; Wyer & Srull, 1986).

Thesis Author: Porter, Heather

Year Completed: 2005

Committee Members: Mark W. Tanner, Alan K. Melby

Thesis Chair: Diane Strong-Krause