Digital Models of Metrics for Distance Assessment of Foreign Language Proficiency

Abstract

The rapid development of global civilization processes determines new requirements for the education. At the same time, the widespread introduction of distance learning during the Covid 19 pandemic revealed many problems: problems with direct distance interaction between students and teachers and organizational ones. On the one hand, new broad ranges of requirements for the knowledge and skills of employees are generated, especially in the distance communication sphere, on the other hand, the globalization of media systems leads to a global transformation of educational structures. Therefore, there is a growing awareness of the need in the shift from full-time expert systems for assessing knowledge and skills to automatic digital testing systems. The paper presents an approach based on the creation of digital representations of the full-time expert assessment components, which allows obtaining structural digital assessment schemes with a minimum use of speech recognition tools. The limitation of the study is the "English language acquisition" subject area with the analysis of knowledge and skills testing at A2 (pre-intermediate) level as the most common one. Methods have been developed for creating digitalization metrics for speaking skill assessment. The developed structural means of transformation of traditional assessment metrics into digital ones are proposed and can be used for checking the main communication component: grammatical and lexical resources, mastering syntax and semantics in a dialogue mode and describing everyday situations, and using phrasal verbs. The substantiation of the possibility to use the proposed approach for automatic distance digital assessment of the foreign language proficiency level is made.