Spanish Language Tests Used in High School and Postsecondary Programs Availability

Spanish Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview (SOPI)

Purpose: To assess the speaking proficiency of high school and college Spanish learners

Target: Students enrolled in traditional high school (grades 11 and above) and college language courses.

(Note: The SOPI is designed for native speakers of English studying Spanish. All the directions, both audio and print, are in English.)

Method and format: Performance-based; simulated oral proficiency interview

The student listens to directions on a master tape, following along in a test booklet, and then responds on a separate tape.

Content: An introductory warm up is followed by picture-based tasks, topic-based tasks, and situation-based tasks.

Administration time: 25 to 50 minutes

Levels and scoring: Responses are scored holistically by trained raters, according to the language proficiency scales of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) http://www.actfl.org.

Reliability/validity: Correlation with ACTFL's Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) has been determined for a number of languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, Hausa, and Indonesian. The correlation between the SOPI and the ACTFL OPI was >.89 in all cases. In addition, inter-rater reliability studies were conducted to determine the consistency of scores among SOPI raters. Inter-rater reliability has ranged from .91 (Hausa) to .97 (Indonesian).


Number of forms: Three

Materials available: Master test tape, examinee response tape, test manual, examinee handbook

Center for Applied Linguistics
4646 40th Street NW
Washington, DC 20016
202-362-0700
http://cal-org.wdi.net