Assessing oral skills : A study comparing the Swedish and Norwegian English syllabi with the Common European Framework of Reference

This is a comparative study of the Swedish and Norwegian syllabi for English for the minimum courses required in order to be allowed to apply for university courses in both countries. The study focuses on the assessment of oral production and what guidelines teachers and students are provided with in order to know what is to be assessed. As a reference point while comparing, the Common European Framework of Reference has been used as a framework for this study. The comparison has been done solely in a text-oriented manner, comparing both of the syllabi with the reference document. In the conclusion, the results drawn from this comparison will be put against each other in order to see any differences between the two syllabi and the ways in which they have interpreted the reference document. The conclusion was that both of the syllabi were largely inspired by the reference document and so turned out to be very similar in many aspects within oral proficiency assessment, as well as there were some aspects where they were quite different. The most obvious of these were the aspect of descriptors of different grade levels which was an aspect where all three documents differed in some manner, the Norwegian syllabus being the document that was least alike the two other documents.