Grammatical complexity in spoken English: towards a definition of a specific oral proficiency of teachers of English as a foreign language

Considering the historical context of unsatisfactory conditions in the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Brazil (Consolo, 2017), this work aims at collaborating with the analytical criteria for assessing grammar in an oral test from an examination that evaluates EFL teachers’ proficiency. Since the progress of a foreign language learner can be observed by the grammatical forms that s/he manages to produce the language adequately (Luoma, 2004), we focus on grammatical complexity, which is the degree of sophistication of those forms (Ortega, 2003). The data used are from participants in the EPPLE (“Exame de Proficiência para Professores de Língua Estrangeira”) oral test and from online English lessons in a Language and Literature course at a public university. The unit of analysis is the AS-unit (Foster et al, 2000). We analyzed how compound verb tenses are characterized in the participants’ speech and present the quantitative and qualitative results.