COCI (Classroom Oral Competence Interview)

Description of the COCI

Assessing student oral performance is often a challenge to teachers. The Classroom Oral Competency Interview (COCI) is an interactive, holistic assessment of oral performance conducted in a natural conversation-like exchange between an interviewer and a second language learner. It takes into consideration the context of the communicative foreign language classroom at the secondary level where teachers need a process for evaluation oral language in a manner that is administered, scored, and interpreted rapidly and easily. The COCI targets a relatively restricted scope of language performance, and divides this language use into three major ranges - formulaic, created, and planned language. Within those major ranges, it focuses on the nature of the language used; it characterizes that use in three subcategories or phases for each of the ranges - low (phase 1), mid (phase 2), and high (phase 3).

Organization of the COCI

The COCI is divided into four sections:

* The Warm-Up: The interviewer begins with language familiar to the student in order to put him/her at ease.