Relating a Sustained Monologue Speaking Production Test to CEFR: Towards Alignment

This article evaluates a sustained monologue speaking production test to validate its link to the CEFR model. The monologue test is a low-stakes production test that engages the test taker in sustained monologue tasks targeted at B2-C1 of the CEFR levels. The evaluation of the test included determining the extent to which the monologue speaking tasks and the single assessment criterion-related rating scale developed for the test are valid and reliably aligned to CEFR benchmarked descriptors. The socio-cognitive framework for test evaluation was adopted, and an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design was implemented. The evaluation revealed some contentious points of contrast between the test items and the language demand that each item prompted in production. Consequently, selected items were improved or deleted to ensure the appropriate competency levelled at B2-C1 are correctly prompted. Additionally, the findings underlined the imperative need for test developers to adhere to five inter-related sets of procedures in the justification of a claim that the monologue speaking test is aligned to the CEFR. These include familiarisation, specification, standardisation and benchmarking, standard-setting, and validation. It emerged that thorough familiarity with the CEFR by test item writers and examiners is a fundamental requirement for a test closely related to CEFR construct and levels. Thus, familiarisation training of CEFR and its illustrative descriptors is a mandatory prerequisite for ensuring test items and assessment of the elicited production correspond to the levels and ratings described in the CEFR model.

Color, Music, and Emotion: Bach to the Blues

When people make cross-modal matches from classical music to colors, they choose colors whose emotional associations fit the emotional associations of the music, supporting the emotional mediation hypothesis. We further explored this result with a large, diverse sample of 34 musical excerpts from different genres, including Blues, Salsa, Heavy metal, and many others, a broad sample of 10 emotion-related rating scales, and a large range of 15 rated music–perceptual features. We found systematic music-to-color associations between perceptual features of the music and perceptual dimensions of the colors chosen as going best/worst with the music (e.g., loud, punchy, distorted music was generally associated with darker, redder, more saturated colors). However, these associations were also consistent with emotional mediation (e.g., agitated-sounding music was associated with agitated-looking colors). Indeed, partialling out the variance due to emotional content eliminated all significant cross-modal correlations between lower level perceptual features. Parallel factor analysis (Parafac, a type of factor analysis that encompasses individual differences) revealed two latent affective factors— arousal and valence—which mediated lower level correspondences in music-to-color associations. Participants thus appear to match music to colors primarily in terms of common, mediating emotional associations.