Developing Multicriteria Rating Scale for Assessment of Communicative Competence in LSP Oral Presentation

This research develops a multicriteria rating scale for the assessment of oral presentations in language for specific purposes (LSP) in order to make the assessment process easier, more objective, and reliable. For this purpose, the prevailing contemporary theoretical models of communicative competence and specific purpose language ability were explored and five different models of multicriteria rating scales were generated. The criteria with the corresponding descriptors were created based on the distinct characteristics of oral communication and public speaking activities. Subsequently, they were the subject of evaluation by 103 foreign language teachers who teach LSP in higher education institutions and vocational secondary schools in Serbia and Croatia. An online survey was used as a data-collection method. The answers were analysed by the quantitative analysis and fuzzy multicriteria decision-making analysis (MCDC) to obtain a favourable model of the scale suitable for the LSP oral presentation assessment. The results show that the Specific Purpose Communicative Competence Scale is the optimal model recommended for evaluating learners’ oral performance in the context of foreign LSP classroom. A ready-made rating scale for the LSP oral presentation assessment whose validity and reliability are based on theoretically and empirically investigated grounds represents the main contribution of the research. The paper also offers various possibilities for further research, such as testing the obtained scale’s validity in practice and comparing it with other assessment instruments.