Análisis cuantitativo sobre la influencia de las actitudes de los profesores de idiomas en el desarrollo de la herramienta de evaluación oral por ordenador(PLEVALEX y PAULEX)

Abstract

Based on the work by GARCÍA LABORDA (2002), this article reports on a study of Valencian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' attitudes towards the defining features necessary to design a computer tool to assess speaking and written competence towards the Spanish University Entrance Examination. The data were collected by means of individual interviews to 3 college-level university professors of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia who taught English, Spanish and French. Their responses were analyzed to identify the characteristics were most demanded to include in the Internet based tool. The results of the study indicate that these teachers mostly demanded the following features: (1) it shpuld include both spoken and written tasks (productive and receptive as well), (2) it should have a powerful database, (3) tests tasks should use both formal academic and informal conversational registers, (4) it should be consistent with the European Framework for the Language, (5) it should rank the students, (6) the platform should have a test bank, (7) statistics should be easy to process by exporting that data in excel formats. The paper concludes by arguing that if the University Entrance Examination is to provide a more means of measuring students� competence, the opinions of all stakeholders involved in the test must be heard in the dialogue between institutions, educational authorities and software designers.