Reading Corpus
Tasks
Reading Corpus 1 French L2
Oral Interview
The students were allocated to a class teacher on the basis of ability. (The school operates a policy of grouping students according to ability from the first year of foreign language study with the regular possibility of promotion or demotion into lower or higher ability groups.) The oral interviews (described in the documentation of the examining group as ‘free conversation’) averaged just over five minutes in length and were conducted by two experienced teachers of French, both of whom tested their own students.
Reading corpus II Native Speakers
Oral interview
The interviews were carried out in two schools near Paris, one in a middle class suburb and the other in an overspill housing area. The interviewer was a French native speaker with long experience of conducting oral examinations in British secondary schools.