Media Related to Language Assessment

 last modified: 4/11/13

Two clips about testing:

NPR "Car Talk" about ridiculous French tests (.mov, 4.7MB)

NPR report about the mass investment needed to score large-stakes tests (.mov, 6.5MB)

Clips from popular movies illustrating common images of language learning. (Goes to another page on this site.)

Danny Kaye breezes through a quadrilingual "OPI" (streaming video, .mov - 1.3MB)

A young Robert Redford tries some German on Alec Guiness (streaming video, .mov - 3.1MB)

Practice Oral Interviews (NOT official OPIs) and Similar Speaking Samples

Please be tolerant of the sound quality. Most of the interviews were made under mediocre sound conditions, and the files here have been compressed so they will download and begin playing more quickly over the internet

ESL Vietnamese woman (21', 13.2MB, .mov)

German: Bambi (18', 12MB)

French: woman, 16.5', 2.4MB))

German: Steve (30', 4.6MB)

French: Walt, 18', 2.7MB))

German: Tim (30', 4.4MB)

French: Chris (12', 10MB)

Spanish: Woman who rides horses (25', 16MB)

Spanish: Woman interviewing woman (23', 3.5MB)

great moments in interviewing - ¿Qué es un 'gelding'? - shorter streaming version (1.0MB, .mov) or longer streaming version (2.7MB, .mov)