Assessing student oral performance is often a challenge to teachers. The Classroom Oral Competency Interview (COCI) is an interactive, holistic assessment of oral performance conducted in a natural conversation-like exchange between an interviewer and a second language learner. It takes into consideration the context of the communicative foreign language classroom at the secondary level where teachers need a process for evaluation oral language in a manner that is administered, scored, and interpreted rapidly and easily. The COCI targets a relatively restricted scope of language performance, and divides this language use into three major ranges - formulaic, created, and planned language. Within those major ranges, it focuses on the nature of the language used; it characterizes that use in three subcategories or phases for each of the ranges - low (phase 1), mid (phase 2), and high (phase 3).

Organization of the COCI

The COCI is divided into four sections:

•The Warm-Up: The interviewer begins with language familiar to the student in order to put him/her at ease.

• Initial Dialogue: The interviewer selects questions from the list of questions suggested for Range 2 to make a preliminary assessment of the student’s performance. Based on that assessment, the interviewer selects or creates questions at a higher or lower range, as appropriate.

• Probing & Validation: The interviewer confirms the preliminary assessment being sure to probe for the student’s highest level of performance.

• Wind-Down: After validating the student's performance, the interviewer brings the student back to the language level which s(he) feels most comfortable.

For more information on the COCI materials, contact:

California Foreign Language Project
Stanford University, CERAS room 125
Stanford, CA, 94305-3084
Phone - (650) 725-2579
Fax - (650) 725-3770

Back to Resources

Top of Page