Investigating task uptake of a group role-play in assessing socializing skills in EFL learners
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Abstract
This paper investigates how as assessment roleplay task was being interpreted and performed by its student test-takers. The rationale for this is that we need feedback into whether the task is functioning the way we intend it to be and to make sure that our interpretation of the scores that we get from grading these students correctly serve our decision making about the students’ ability. T First, there may be a significant difference between the teacher task design and student task uptake. To For an open roleplay task where students must choose their own persona to perform for the assessment task, the choice of roles can affect the quality of interaction, which in turn can affect the scores they eventually receive for the task. This study is a mixed method study which seek to answer the question of how we can use the information that we have about students’ task uptake to improve the assessment practices for the next iteration of this task. To this end, the study first evaluated the personas students had selected for their roleplay to see the features that separate between appropriate and inappropriate roles for the task. Later, the task uptake in terms of the qualities of their roleplay interaction was investigated through the lens of conversation analysis (CA). Treating this roleplay assessment task as a social practice, the study describes how students engaged in the roleplay within the parameters of the assessment task. The results show very few incidences of roleplay personas deemed to be inappropriate for the task, showing a good level of alignment between student task uptake and the intended design of the assessment task. The CA results show this roleplay’s features of the roleplay provides opportunities for students to display interactional skills that are similar to that of real-life interactions. The findings highlight the unique aspects of communication skills that this open roleplay task requires from the students such as turn-taking organization, overall sequential organization, and topic management practices.
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