'Naive' native speakers and judgements of oral proficiency in Spanish

Abstract

The notion of the 'native speaker' occupies an important place in any theory of foreign language proficiency. In the case of the ACTFL oral interview, on several occasions the 'native speaker' is invoked as a hypothetical interlocutor for candidates. However, no body of research evidence exists as a foundation for such a use of the concept of 'native speaker'. In an effort to discover whether native speakers do really react to differing levels of proficiency in the way predicted for them in the ACTFL scale, a study was carried out in Barcelona, Spain. A group of linguistically 'naive' native speakers evaluated American students' performances on taped ACTFL oral interviews in Spanish. Apart from the fact that there was a considerable divergence in how they viewed particular candidates' exhibited proficiency, it was striking that the native speakers were consistently more strict in their evaluations than was an ACTFL-trained rater.