Testing With OPI, Working With a Professional Teacher

[Nathan Mao]

I'm always eager for feedback on my Chinese ability level, so when April Zhu offered a chance to take a free Chinese speaking evaluation, I jumped at it immediately.

 

Ms. Zhu is an excellent and experienced teacher.  To the best of my understanding, she is seeking certification to be able to give speaking evaluation tests.  To be able to demonstrate her mastery of this skill, she has to administer speaking tests to students of all levels, and then evaluate these students on the basis of several metrics.  To evaluate her, someone (her teacher?) listens in on the conversation and evaluates Ms Zhu on her ability to lead the conversation, as well as evaluates the student's response to compare with Ms Zhu's evaluation, in order to confirm that Ms Zhu's evaluation is correct.

 

Ms Zhu contacted me several times before the scheduled interview to make sure the time was still good, and to make sure I was prepared for the interview.

 

One of the preparations was making sure I understood how to introduce myself in an appropriate manner for the test (giving an appropriate Chinese name).

She also made sure that I understood that she would be asking me questions about myself, my experiences, my family, my biographical information, current events, and possibly a role-playing scenario.

 

She evaluated me on grammar, pronunciation, word appropriateness, vocabulary level, fluidity, and clarity of logic.

 

We never made it to the role-playing scenario within the 30 minutes, but she said she had enough information to be able to evaluate me.

 

My biggest problem was when she asked me to think of any recent news items that I had read or saw lately, and my mind went blank.  I usually read a lot of news, but the few days prior had been too busy.  After a few seconds of frantic thought, I came up with an article I read that was a sort of commentary on a social phenomenon.  I thought I could handle the topic, but I didn't do as well there.  I might have been better off discussing a hard news item, had I thought of one.

 

This was almost identical to the oral proficiency portion of the Defense Language Proficiency Test.

 

During the test, she was very supportive and complementary, which made it easy to keep talking without worrying about mistakes.  Or to put it another way, she was extremely good at putting me at ease. That is probably another skill they teach professional speaking evaluators.

 

After the test, she was very careful to accentuate the positive.

She started with asking me how I thought I did and where I would evaluate myself.

Interestingly, I rated myself much lower than she did.

 

I won't get into all the details of what I did well, but my weakness was when I started talking about the news-ish article, my logical train of thought wasn't very clear, and she couldn't follow it.

 

Now, one could argue that if I lack the ability to string thoughts together in a coherent manner that it shouldn't lower my test score, but I guess it is an accepted tenet of second language acquisition that logical clarity is actually one of the higher levels of language mastery demonstration.

 

I asked her what I could do to improve, because my vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation did not result in any markdowns.  She said that I should pay more attention to news items. Notice how they use the language to introduce the topic, and then develop the topic.  She said that the more I attempt to describe events or news items, and the more I model the way an actual news broadcaster introduces and develops the topic, the better I will get.

 

I responded that perhaps my problem with logical flow is that I am so busy trying to think of the next thing I'm going to say that I don't have time to think of the entire logic (intro, 1, 2, 3, conclusion), and I'm using up brainpower listening to myself to check my pronunciation, grammar and word choice, so if I slow down, maybe I'll have more time to think and speak logically.

 

She said that was incorrect, that the problem is not that I don't have enough time to think, but that as my Chinese continues to improve I will add automaticity: I will be able to say what I want to say automatically, with the entire concept spontaneously arriving as needed.  Just like it does in my first language.

 

I feel this is accurate because there are times that my wife grows impatient and irritated when I try to tell a story or describe my views using Chinese.  Now I can understand that her impatience is because I'm probably just rambling along and my intent is lost in the lack of logical clarity.  She also complained last year when we went to China that in conversations with her family, I kept bringing the conversation back to what I wanted to say after the conversation had moved on.

 

That could be discouraging...except that my wife is applying the standards she would expect from any native speaker to me.  She is now no longer making any allowances at all for Chinese being my second language.

 

So I can practice my logical flow in Chinese by telling more stories to my wife.  But I need to spend more time thinking about it first.

 

Then a few days ago I was speaking with a recruiter who clearly had learned English as a second language.  Her pronunciation was flawless and her grammar was excellent. But when she tried to explain to me the difference between three different possible programs, her logic was disjointed and she rambled badly.  I was able to follow her meaning, but it was difficult.

 

"Aha", I thought, "This is a good example of my problem in Chinese."

 

If I have misrepresented or misunderstood anything Ms Zhu told me, the fault is entirely mine.  She is an excellent teacher, unfailingly supportive, continually positive, and very pleasant to work with.

[roddy]

Thanks Nathan. For reference, this is a bit of a follow up to this. 

[Tianjin42]

I was coming online to do the same thing and Nathan beat me to it. Just to put forward my thoughts:

 

Like Nathan I was very interested in getting some feedback about my progress  - especially in regard to conversation. Whilst the HSK is a useful barometer, it doesn’t really measure that everyday conversational Chinese that many students are aiming for.

 

As stated – April Zhu was very positive – checking things before hand and then handling the actual interview warmly and professionally. For a decent overview off the test structure you may want to look here: http://lang-8.com/219967/journals/1266514

 

I decided to prepare before the test though my preparation was in no way exhaustive. Come the test itself, it started simply and gradually we tackled more difficult topics that demanded a better deployed and wider range of vocabulary.

 

I am very interested in the news in China so this question wasn’t a major issue but there were moments in general where I felt that my Chinese was really being stretched.

 

We ended the exam and then Ms. Zhu said she would be able to call back and provide feedback in 10 to 20 minutes. She did and the feedback was extremely useful (she discussed word usage and also word selection as well as how I might have expressed the same meaning in a more authentic manner). Most surprising for me was the score: the level is from 1 (beginner) to 10 (essentially native/ fluent). I was aiming for 7 but was told that I had scored 9. I suppose this was something of a fillip and evidence that working in a Chinese office is positive for speaking and listening. I still feel that there is so much I don’t understand and I joked with Ms. Zhu that she had spent too long testing university students in the US who would probably have difficulty with fluent conversation.

 

So all in all it was a positive experience for me and probably means I should be a little more confident when speaking. People might wish to (or be required to) take the test for various reasons – I would be happy to speak in further detail via Private Message as required. 

[imron]

I would be happy to speak in further detail via Private Message as required.

It would be even better if people discussed it in this thread so future readers could benefit from it also.

[Tianjin42]

Yes that wouldn't be a problem. Contact here if you wish.