Demystifying textual competence descriptors of organizational competence

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

Textual competence (Purpura, 2004; Bachman & Palmer, 1996, 2010) is an indispensable component of the organizational competence verified by various research studies in language communication. This presentation reports the validation process of textual competence descriptors of organizational competence subscale in China’s Standards of English (CSE). After the generation of textual competence descriptors, quantitative and qualitative data were collected to verify the usefulness of the descriptors. In the first phase, 20,514 teachers and 88,571 students in China were sampled to answer the online questionnaires based on the CSE descriptor pool. All the data were calculated and equated so as to be presented on the same scale. The ones that were outfit and with different levels of difficulty as classified by the experts were selected to be complemented, combined and revised in order to shape the desired descriptors. The revised descriptors were assembled for focus-group interviews with English teachers in corresponding level of schooling in the second phase. For each level in the CSE, ten teachers each from six representative provinces in China showed their understandings and confusions about the descriptors. The results showed that teachers of basic education were unfamiliar with knowledge of textual competence. The research team revisited the descriptors on the basis of the feedback from the teachers so as to demystify the essence of descriptors. It is suggested knowledge of textual competence be an important component of the English teacher knowledge and there is still a long way to go to integrate it in English teaching practice.

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