말하기시험 준비과정에 나타난 구어문법 연구

The purpose of this study is to explore the use of spoken grammar elicited from speaking test preparation. In this study, 15 college students performed three different speaking mock tests: TOEIC Speaking, TOEFL iBT Speaking and OPIc. All the spoken data were recorded and transcribed before classified into eight categories of spoken grammar which were originally framed by Thornbury and Slade (2006). It was found that students frequently used the features of deixis, present tense and grammatical incompletion during the test preparation contexts. However, unlike in the natural speaking settings, they rarely used heads and tails, ellipsis and question forms. It was argued that, if any speaking test intends to reflect target language use and have positive impact on the test-related learning, the spoken features of elicited test samples in this study can be meaningful evidence to question the construct and consequential test validity. Speaking test professionals need to elaborate the authenticity issues of spoken grammar and connect the discussions into the item writing, rating, rater training, and test validation stage.