Evaluative Setting and Oral Production

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the influence of an evaluative setting on the Foreign Languages (FL) oral production. It was hypothesized that the FL oral production of FL learners would increase being challenged in an evaluating setting. This last term is created based on authors that refer to the importance of the teaching, learning, and evaluative methods during the FL learning process (Krashen and Terrell, 1983; McDonough and Shaw, 1993; Courtillon, 2003; Lozanov, 2005; Loewen, 2007; Clerc, 2010). The study describes the possible factors and elements that surround the evaluative process of the ability to communicate verbally in the target languages. A total of ten (10) learners were observed and interviewed in a mixed method research. The findings were analyzed taking into account interpretative techniques, recursive abstraction and coding procedures. It was found that students seem to respond to diverse personal needs increasing the FL oral communication when they are evaluated. Additionally, the characteristics of the evaluative setting components may affect the results of the oral evaluations.