Incoherent coherence? Using systemic functional linguistics to improve oral language assessment literacy
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Fenton-Smith, Ben
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This paper discusses the challenges of defining coherence in the context of oral language assessment literacy and proposes that better understanding of the construct can be achieved through a systemic-functional linguistic lens. Coherence is taken to be a foundational quality of written and spoken discourse and is a standard feature in the assessment rubrics of most large-scale English-language oral proficiency tests such as IELTS, TOEFL, and Cambridge. However, the precise meaning of coherence, and how it can be identified in language, is difficult to grasp. This has implications for the makers and raters of tests as well as the candidates who take them. The literature suggests coherence is the most troublesome category to rate reliably and validly. The systemic-functional linguistic (SFL) model of language provides a rich description of coherence, but has been under-utilised by the language testing industry to date. In this paper we examine three aspects of coherence: (1) how it is currently conceptualised in oral language proficiency testing; (2) how it is conceptualised in linguistics in general and SFL in particular; and (3) how insights from SFL could inform the evaluation of coherence in oral language proficiency examinations.
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The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy
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© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Applied linguistics and educational linguistics
Curriculum and pedagogy
Education systems
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Kawabata, D; Fenton-Smith, B, Incoherent coherence? Using systemic functional linguistics to improve oral language assessment literacy, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2024