An oral interview procedure for assessing second language abilities in children

Abstract

There has been a recent proliferation of Japanese language immersion schools in the USA, reflecting a surge of interest in developing Japanese language abilities in ever-younger children. Efforts to develop and evaluate programmes, though, are hindered by the absence of assessment instruments for measuring progress and competence in young children. In this article we present the goals, design and pilot-testing results of a new oral interview procedure for eliciting a representative sample of spontaneous Japanese language abilities from children aged 5-10. The test consists of six subsets and makes use of realia, role playing, information gap activities and naturalistic conversation, all designed to comprise an oral interview that is devel opmentally appropriate and comparable across children of different levels in different programmes, while overcoming some of the special problems of children's reluctance to interact as equal conversational partners with unfamiliar adults. Pilot results show that the procedure elicits a language sample that is superior in quality and quantity to other existing Japanese language assessment instruments for children.