Have you ever come across a student who can speak with impressive fluency and accuracy or write with complex sentences and advanced vocabulary but is unable to grasp the nature of a task and cannot accomplish the goal as required by the assessment?   If you have, you may be looking at an issue with ‘functional adequacy’ (FA).  

FA can be understood as “the degree to which a learners’ performance is more or less successful in achieving the task’s goals efficiently” (Pallotti, 2009, p. 596) as well as “knowledge and employment of both linguistic and interactional resources in social contexts” (Révész et al., 2016, as cited in Bui and Wong, 2021). These definitions challenge the assumption that a student’s L2 performance is largely a matter of linguistic competence.  Without FA, a student, however proficient in the target language, may flail or even fail in pragmatic communication.

In order to link this pragmatic competence to the choice and quality of linguistic forms produced by a L2 student, there has been calls from TBLT (task-based language teaching) researchers (Pollatti, 2009, Kuiken & Vedder, 2017) to add FA as a separate component to the measurement of L2 performance in the widely accepted CAF (complexity, accuracy and fluency) and the more recently proposed CALF (complexity, accuracy, lexis and fluency) framework.   In so doing, the existing CALF framework will expand and become CALFFA where FA can be measured by “content, task requirements, comprehensibility and coherence and cohesion” (Kuiken & Vedder, 2017).  However, this latest framework is considered by some as merely a way to address FA in principle within the controlled environment of an assessment and there are bound to be issues to be dealt with once it is to be gauged in more ‘real-life’ communication.  Some issues with FA that linguist Bui (2021) has identified include whether and how a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic context may affect one’s FA and whether the generalized social appropriateness and a single idealized form as acquired in the classroom may affect one’s FA adversely over the long run and if so, how it can be corrected. 

To understand these issues, I participated in an investigation with a linguistic professor in a sister university this summer.  In this investigation, eight university students were asked to spot and describe the differences between two pictures of Western-style houses with features unfound in most Hong Kong/Asian contexts. They were also required to respond to a customer’s letter of complaint with limited time of reading.  They were divided into four groups with a varying level of difficulty and a different sequence of these two tasks.  They were then interviewed one on one about their experience.  Based on the transcripts, open coding was made at this stage and below are a few preliminary findings with some questions that I hope can spawn more discussions from our colleagues:

1.     Many participants are hindered by the unfamiliar concept or the vocabulary of ‘chimney’ in their descriptions; only a few are able to rely on paraphrases flexibly to get around it.  By comparison, many are much more familiar with the trouble-shooting procedure with dealing with a complainant whether they have had any real-world experience dealing with anything of such sort or not.  (What does this mean regarding the impact from the cross-cultural and context-dependent elements on FA in the assessment design?  Does it raise any question about whether a task successfully completed in one particular context necessarily predicts its equal competition in another context?)

2.     Many have not thought about a possible theme or a real purpose behind these tasks, only to have a sudden realization of them after being pointed out by the researchers.  (Would an understanding of them help one develop ideas more suited to the occasion and deliver better performance?  Would a purposeful mention help to enhance the retention of the learning points in teaching as well? )

3.     Many have observed the relative ease of structuring ideas in writing in contrast to the difficulty in applying that same skill to speaking.  (What is it that makes it difficult for students to transfer certain skills from writing to speaking or vice versa and what can be done to facilitate that transfer?)  

4.     Many predict better quality in their output if they could discuss the task (especially for the complaint one) with another participant in an exchange mode, compared to having to take it on all alone.  (What implications would this have for speaking assessments that may involve a pair or a group each time rather than the conventional one-on-one mode?)  

5.     When asked about the awareness of tone and formality and the use of a sequence and connectives, many have recollection of them having been taught in class but are unable to think of them on the fly or include them in their efforts expended to make the output more comprehensible for the audience.  (What does it say about the effectiveness of the teaching/learning of audience awareness to enhance comprehensibility?)

6.     Many have noted the lack of preparation time and have indicated more preparation may help them prepare the content in a better structure.  (Is the preparation time given in most assessments an arbitrary or logistically convenient one?  What is the ideal preparation time beyond which there would be minimal difference in the participants’ FA?)  

7.     Many have found it beneficial if the total number of points (information units in terms of content) to be covered can be mentioned in the instructions. However, there would be no such support in real-world communication. (Do we have a gap between the carefully controlled assessment and pragmatic competence? Do we find current teaching support sufficient to help our students to develop a way to quickly gauge the needs and the scope of a communicative situation without readily available information?)

8.     When asked if cultural background plays any role in helping or hindering their output, many have mentioned the benefit of having vicarious experience/exposure to certain features of objects or scenarios through TV or the Internet even though they are not brought up in that given culture.  (Considering the generation born and bred in the digital boom or the metaverse down the road, is vicarious experience/exposure as powerful as real-life ones to help students relate to certain subject matters?  How can teachers tap into such knowledge on the part of the students?)

9.     Many have found the task about spotting differences less challenging than the complaint letter one, citing the relative ease of description over having to come up with responses after critical thinking as the main reason.  They also see the spotting differences one as more language-based and the complaint letter task as more content-based and thus why the former is less difficult than the latter.  (What does this say about our students’ perception of content vs. language?  And more importantly, has FA, of which content is a component, been adequately emphasized in our teaching?)

10.  When asked if speakers (including native speakers of the target language) of a particular background have any advantage over other ones in the assessment, the participants have mixed responses as to whether proficiency takes precedence over familiarity with topics and themes (closely related to FA) or vice versa in the performance. (How do we emphasize FA in subject-sensitive language courses while striking a balance between subject content and language use?)  

References

Bui, G., &  Wong, C. H. (2021). From Linguistic Skills to Pragmatic Competence: The Role of Functional Adequacy in Task-Based Teaching and Learning. Asian Journal of English Language Teaching, 30, 61-76.

Kuiken, F., & Vedder, I. (2017). Functional adequacy in L2 writing: Towards a new rating scale. Language Testing, 34(3), 321-336.

Pallotti, G. (2009). CAF: Defining, refining and differentiating constructs. Applied linguistics, 30(4), 590-601.

The prevalent public health measures against the spread of the COVID-19 disease like social distancing guidelines are necessary but they can make us feel isolated and lonely. Young people are even more vulnerable. The World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly issued warnings over youth mental health. Medical professionals have acknowledged the existence of COVID-induced stress and its insidious creep into the fabric of student life. Sadly, open discussions on mental health issues are often viewed as a form of weakness, if not a taboo, among students. Our exploratory project aims to re-socialize students through a collaborative mobile app (StudyBird) to boost mental health literacy and its support networks on campus. The concept of StudyBird is similar to a taxi-hiring app which connects randomly available students (both local and international students) to perform their shared social/sports/learning activities together. Once students shared their locations and activities, the system will automatically match the closest students with similar shared activities together. Without the interference of the human preferences (e.g. staying with your own kin), our app promotes and allows students from diverse cultural backgrounds to meet and mingle with one another. The preliminary results from the three test groups (n=29) indicated positive user feedback, especially about enlarging their social networks in their trusted environment, i.e. our campus. Activity matching in the app and stability of our app is yet to improve. Data analytics has been performed continuously by applying machine learning technology to the data on backend to help students predict their learning progress.