Oral Interview Guideline

1.  FRAME OF THE INTERVIEW AND GENERAL TOPICS

Opening Conversation
Greetings and small talk about time, date, days of the week, weather and climate, etc.

Personal Information
You can talk about yourself, your family, friend(s), pet(s), etc. on:
Age, major and year in college, birthday, hometown, living arrangement, favorite things (activities, foods, music, movies, TV programs, celebrities, etc.), personality, and so on.
Japanese Class and Studying Japanese
You can describe your Japanese class and experience of studying Japanese about:
Time and place of the class, teacher, classmates, difficulty, likes and dislikes, when and where you study Japanese, etc.

Japanese Class and Studying Japanese
You can describe your Japanese class and experienceof studying Japanese about:
Time and place of the class, teacher, classmates,difficulty, likes and dislikes, when and where you study Japanese, etc.

Daily Activities
You should be able to describe your typical day and weekend.
What, where, when, how often, with whom, etc. about anything you do.

Past Events and Future Plans
Things you did in the past:
e.g. last summer, Christmas, last week, yesterday, etc.
Things you plan to do in the future:
e.g. tomorrow, next week, during the Spring Break, this summer, next year, etc.

Closing Conversation
Greetings and short comments on the interview (e.g. easy, difficult, fun, etc.).

 2. VOCABULARY, EXPRESSIONS, GRAMMATICAL PATTERNS
Refer to this list to find ways to express yourself and ask your teacher questions.
 Everyday greetings
 Numbers (e.g. telephone #, counters for different things, time, price, etc.)
 Likes and dislikes
 Locations and buildings (e.g. names of streets, stores, etc.)
 Existence of things and people
 Describing things and people (cf. I-adjectives and Na-adjectives)
 Verbs for activities
 Nonpast and Past Forms of verbs (~MASU, ~MASEN, ~MASHITA, ~MASENDESHITA)
 Time (months, weeks, days, time)   (cf. p. 182-183 of the textbook)
 Frequency adverbs (cf. p. 204-205 of the textbook)
 Expressions for making suggestions (~MASHOU, MASENKA)
 Conjunctions for nominals: TO and YA
 TE-forms of adjectives, verbs, and the copula
 Comparatives and Superlatives
  x YORI y NOHOU
  ...NONAKADE, ICHIBAN
 x WA y TO ONAJIGURAI
 x WA y HODO… (negative expression)
 Emphatic N/NODESU (e.g. Explaining a reason)
 Probability / Conjecture Expressions (DESHOU/ KAMOSHIREMASEN)
Describing Abilities
Nominalizers: KOTO/NO

3. Evaluation Criteria
You will be evaluated on your overall conversational proficiency.  It is as important for you to initiate conversational interactions (e.g. by asking questions) as to sustain them (e.g. by answering questions and responding to statements).  In other words, you are expected to be an active participant in the conversation.  Prepare well enough so that you can take the initiative in the interview, which will make it easier for you to lead the conversation in the direction where there are more topics you can talk about with confidence.

 Speak Test Individual Evaluation Form

Preparation (8):
Thoroughness of you and your partner’s preparation, especially reflected in flawless presentation and elaborate content of the conversation.

Communicative Strategy (8):
Your ability to initiate, sustain, restore, develop an interactive language use.

 Comprehensibility (8):
Your ability to use utterances easily understood by others.

Language Variety (8):
Your ability to use variety of grammar structures and words.

Fluency (8):
Your ability to talk smoothly without excessive hesitations and pauses.

Total:  40 points