Rating Scales Revisited: EFL Writing Assessment Context of Iran under Scrutiny

摘要

The current study aims at investigating the impact of Audio/Voice conferencing, as a new approach to teaching speaking, on the speaking performance and/or speaking band score of IELTS candidates. Experimental group subjects participated in an audio conferencing class while those of the control group enjoyed attending in a traditional IELTS speaking class. At the end of the study, all subjects participated in an IELTS Examination held on November 2011 in Tehran, Iran. To compare the group means for the study, an independent t-test analysis was employed. The difference between experimental and control group was considered to be statistically significant (P 0.01). That is the candidates in experimental group have outperformed the ones in control group in IELTS speaking scores.