The Interaction Between the Type of Rhetorical Modes & the Assessment of Iranian EFL Oral Proficiency

The present study aimed to investigate the interaction between four modes of rhetorical discourse and the type of rating procedure used for assessing the speaking ability of Iranian EFL learners. A corpus including the recorded speech of 32 advanced EFL learners was subjected to two methods of rating and also analysed with respect to four rhetorical discourse representations of narration, explanation, description, and argumentation. Four competent raters rated the recorded speech once based on a holistic set of criteria and also according to an analytic basis (ACTFL). The obtained data was then subjected to a two‐way ANOVA. The results indicated the differential performances of the candidates, which was argued to be attributable to the very nature of the four rhetorical modes of spoken discourse in that each mode of discourse demands certain linguistic structures and a number of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, or discoursal formulations.