Philippine E-Journals

Oral Proficiency Assessment of Pre-Service Teachers of a Public University in the Philippines

Abigail C. Gomez

 

Abstract:

In 2016, the Philippines ranked 13th in the English Proficiency Index worldwide as released by Education First, Ltd. With this, English teachers from the Philippines should continuously revitalize their teaching strategies and classroom practices to be competitively at par with other Asian countries. This quantitative study assessed the oral proficiency of the graduating Bachelor of Secondary Education major in English students or pre-service teachers from Cavite State University- Imus Campus. The study was anchored on the concepts of Bachman and Palmer (1996)’s oral language ability. Methods such as utilization of survey questionnaire, observation of speaking mistakes, and assessment of oral proficiency during focus group discussions and teaching demonstrations were done. The results showed that participants seldom use English in daily tasks, thus, also seldom encounter speaking difficulties. As observed, during focus group discussion, the most speaking mistake they committed is the code-switching of Filipino and English languages. However, when it comes to teaching demonstrations, grammatical errors, mostly subject-verb agreement, became evident. In the assessment of the oral proficiency, the mean ratings of 3.35 and 3.15 determined the proficiency level of the participants. These scores categorized the pre-service teacher participants as advanced speakers of English.