DIALOGIC INTERACTIVE SPEAKING SKILLS ASSESSMENT IN THE EXPERIENTIAL TEACHING OF TECHNICAL ENGLISH TO TERTIARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

The article discusses the outcomes of the research on dialogic interactive skills assessment in teaching Technical English to tertiary school students. The authors propose to implement dialogic collaborative interaction as both the medium of instruction and an alternative assessment tool. Theoretically, the study relies on the assumption that Technical English speaking skills acquisition is carried out through different types of communicative interaction and collaborative dialogic interaction in particular. The procedure proposed for speaking skills assessment has been primarily targeted at sustaining oral collaborative interaction along with assessing students’ communicative competence. The research represented relies on the experimental teaching English speaking skills to the 1st year Bachelor’s students (n=84) at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. The assessment criteria include conformity of utterances to the topic; speaking tempo; relative grammatical, lexical and phonetic accuracy; cohesion and coherence; compliance with the stylistic and etiquette conventions of English; diversity of grammatical and lexical devices for reaching mutual understanding between the dialogue participants; the interlocutor’s speaking initialisation; reaching consensus; and background knowledge deduction. The results of the research confirm that the assessment procedure introduced contributes to boosting oral production if the techniques of supporting collaborative dialogic interaction are applied by the interlocutors. Collaborative dialogue positively affects the development of students’ communicative competence and acquisition of such skills as perceiving, understanding and decoding the content of oral texts, identifying the communicative purpose of interlocutor’s utterances through analysing verbal and non-verbal means; defining the style and genre of utterances and aligning them with stylistic registers in English.


Introduction
Today when we are creating a new global economic system with unified information flows, the question of preparing highly qualified specialists in different branches of science and technologywho will possess a good command of the most widely used world languages, and the English language in particularis being raised more and more frequently. This very process demands, among other things, alignment of the existing foreign language communicative competence assessment criteria and methods. All these tendencies will, undoubtedly, contribute to achieving the main goal, i.e. the unimpeded communication and co-operation between specialists of different countries.
The Assessment of oral production in the second language acquisition process, and assessing Technical English communicative competence formation in particular, have been a central concern of numerous researchers from both Ukraine and abroad. Currently, the majority of scholars are still using the prevailing schemes of assessing oral performance at certain stages of professional foreign language training (Arnó-Macià, 2014).
They are mostly focused on the following skills: memorising and using speech samples; accumulating linguistic units, comparing discrete language facts; using new knowledge in stereotyped exercises and tasks; doing standardised tests.
This list of skills, however, does not meet the demands of the stakeholders of various national educational systems. According to the report "Cross-nationally comparable education statistics" by the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED, 2013), each national educational system of non-English speaking countries is authorised to identify a language repertoire that should be tested and assessed. For example, in the context of assessing the learning outcomes of students majoring in the Ukrainian language, attention should be paid to the syntax of oral/written production; punctuation in the written text; inversion and metaphorisation as stylistic characteristics of the Ukrainian language. The assessment of English as a foreign language in the United States focuses, among other things, on the dialect specifics pertaining to every state. The indicated variety generates various approaches to arranging assessment procedures, strategies and interpersonal interactions within them. This article is the first attempt to present the outcomes of the research on the introduction of an alternative foreign language competence assessment tool, namely using dialogical interaction as both the medium of instruction and foreign language competence assessment tool. This research has been carried out within the framework of Erasmus+ academic mobility programme (KA -107, 2017-2018 and its results were presented at the Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus. The authors share the belief that dialogic interaction may serve as a significant tool in the L2 assessment strategy in national education systems (Beattie & Ellis, 2014). The foundations for the development of dialogic strategies in language teaching have been laid by Ramon Flecha (Flecha, 2000) and Paulo Freire (Freire, 2005). Simon Borg, a British researcher of the interaction between teachers and students, states that the system of beliefs and the personality of the language teacher have a bigger impact on the development of the learner's linguistic personality than the textbook and curriculum (Borg, 2006). According to Geoffrey Beattie, a researcher of natural communication psychology, dialogic interaction is somewhat more than a speech mode; it is "the main channel in the range of human communication channels" (Beattie & Ellis, 2017, p. 112).
A modern understanding of dialogue goes beyond interpreting it as the mode of speech. The dialogue theorists tend to emphasise the dialogic nature of human existence. In this sense, dialogue is a "creative interaction that allows new insights and unexpected ideas to emerge from the encounter" (Banathy & Jenlink, 2005, p. 82). Hence, the term "dialogue" is interpreted in this paper not as merely the exchange of utterances, but as a much deeper notion which is "…interaction between parties with the intention of generation a shared understanding, something deeper than knowledge transmission" (Prince, Handley, & O'Donovan, 2013, p. 43).
Attempts to focus learners' attention solely on the form of speech (Long, 2014) will result in teaching students to produce certain functional types of dialogues, and the whole educational process will be focused on grammatical means of communicative goal achievement. We share the opinion expressed by Ammar and Hassan (2017) that collaborative dialogue corresponds to the interpersonal dimension of "languagingspeaking" with another person about a certain problem in a foreign language (p. 49). In such a way, mastering a foreign language through collaborative dialogue is based on the concept that it is the "collaborative dialogue that mediates joint problem solving and knowledge building" (Lantolf, 2000, p. 102). In a collaborative dialogue, one or both speakers may refine their knowledge or come to a new or deeper understanding of a phenomenon (Swain & Watanabe, 2012). The participants of the collaborative dialogue will inevitably do their best to understand each other, to reach a consensus and use the language as a cognitive tool to mediate students' own thinking and that of their partners.
Modern tendencies in teaching dialogic speech do not focus only on structural peculiarities of dialogues as well as linguistic content typical of the main functional types of dialogues (Weigand, 2017). Today communicative along with problem-solving skills have been added to the teaching content. That is why in our research we have used collaborative dialogue as a distinctive, integrative form of communicative interaction within the limits of which it is possible to simultaneously teach students majoring in technology several functional types of dialogues, i.e. interviewing, mutual questioning, opinions and impressions exchanging, discussion, etc. (Dobao, 2012;Liubashenko & Yashenkova, 2015).

Objective and tasks
According to "The Common European Framework (CEFR)", the language assessment targets: 1) reading comprehension; 2) listening comprehension; 3) oral and written production; 4) oral and written interaction; 5) mediationtranslation and interpreting. It is widely recognised that dialogic speaking is commonly assessed as a form of oral production, although it tends to be only an aspect in teaching or assessment process. As a result, the potential of dialogic interaction as an assessment tool used for enhancing speaking skills is underestimated and not applied to the full. Consequently, the assessors act primarily as conventional examiners instead of being active interlocutors facilitating interaction. If properly implemented, collaborative dialogue becomes a powerful assessment tool in which "the two faces of utterancethe cognitive activity and the product of itare present in both output and collaborative dialogue" (Lantolf, 2000, p. 102). All the above urge the authors to unveil and conceptualise the potential of dialogical interaction as the assessment tool in the process of both teaching Technical English and assessing students' progress in dialogic speaking skills formation. Therefore, the objective of the article is to examine the influence of the collaborative dialogue on the enhancement of speaking skills in tertiary school students majoring in technology. The present study targets the following research tasks: RT1: to teach tertiary school students majoring in technology to produce collaborative dialogues, RT2: to identify the potential of collaborative dialogue as a speaking skills assessment tool on the basis of the criteria implemented, RT3: to assess the influence of supporting dialogic interaction techniques on the development of oral production competence.

Participants
In the experiment, five groups of students took part, all of them studying at the Institute of Applied System Analysis of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. The total number of participants accounted for 84 students in the first year of study. The study was carried out on a voluntary basis, that is why the students were notified beforehand, and they all agreed to participate. Thus, all the groups were considered to be experimental (EG). The composition of groups was as follows: EG1 -9 men, 7 women, all being native Ukrainian speakers; EG2 -11 men, 6 women, 1 Russian native speaker; EG3 -12 men, 5 women, all being native Ukrainian speakers; EG4 -14 men, 4 women, 3 Russian native speakers; EG5 -13 men, 3 women, all being native Ukrainian speakers. The researchers acted as both facilitators and observers, focusing on developing students' speaking skills within the experiential ESP teaching and the impact of collaborative dialogue interaction on them.

Material and Procedure
This study adopted the experiential methodology of English teachingthe main constituent of a constructivist approach to language teaching, which can introduce collaborative interaction into learning and assessing ESP skills formation to the full. The background of the experiential methodology of teaching English lies in the concept of the so-called 'learning by doing' developed by J. Dewey at the beginning of the 20th century (Dewey, 1938). Following D. Kolb, we define the experiential study as the study through the experience of practical activities, which are conducted by means of the language being learnt (Kolb, 1984). This methodology has gained special popularity in recent decades in the American practice of teaching English as a second language, but this research is the first attempt to work out on its basis the model for dialogic interactive skills assessment in professional communication. That is why this very methodology was used in the new textbook "Professional Basics", developed by O. B. Tarnopolsky, Z. M. Kornieva and their colleagues (Tarnopolsky et al., 2016). Firstly, the effectiveness of the study using this textbook was tested in the course of the experiment, conducted at the National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute" (2016-2017 AY). The textbook materials served different instructional tasks, for example, all the textbook activities were designed in such a way that learning English was implemented through using it for communication directed at ensuring extra-linguistic activities of professional nature. For instance, teaching students English dialogic interactive skills in professional telephoning was organised as modelling real-life professional telephone conversations, i.e. by way of letting students experience such professional telephoning in practice. Therefore, the most frequent learning activities suggested in the textbook were those that imitated, or modelled, relevant professional activitiesrole plays and simulations, students' professionally-oriented presentations and discussions, writing professionally-oriented documents (essays, abstracts, summaries, letters, etc.), project tasks, reading or listening to obtain some professionally relevant information, Internet searches for such information and the like. Neither of the tasks in the textbook would be possible without implementing students' Internet search for information on English web sites. For students doing such out-of-class Internet searches was obligatory. To organise students' Internet searches, the teacher had to be able to recommend different web sites in English to the students.
Hence, experiential teaching methods were used in the experimental learning scenario. The experimental study was conducted according to the recommendations given in the above-mentioned textbook and according to the principles and particularities of the experiential methodology proposed. During the first year of study (72 academic hours), collaborative dialogic speaking skills were developed in students majoring in System Analyses within the limits of the following professional topics:  professional telephoning;  professional negotiations;  professional presentations;  advertising one's own organisation/company and its products/services;  purchasing goods/products/equipment from other organisations/companies;  selling goods/products/equipment of one's own organisation/company;  preparing and receiving instructions on how to use products/equipment;  professional and business contracts with other organisations/companies;  organising and financing joint ventures;  participating in professional/business fairs and exhibitions.
During the survey carried out among the students who took part in the research prior to the experimental study, the following problems were identified with the majority of students:  they do not have experience of sustaining collaborative dialogues;  they lack professional vocabulary to carry out dialogic interactions;  they do not have the skills to analyse and foresee the dialogue structure;  they make numerous mistakes in the utterances and fail to continue and maintain collaborative dialogues;  they cannot obtain, specify and deepen their knowledge in the course of the collaborative dialogue;  they have insufficient experience of dialogic interaction as a common learning activity. In order to overcome the above-listed problems within the framework of oral production, the students were offered a series of dialogues for the analyses based on parameters indicated (Table 1) and further discussion with the teacher or peers with a view to supporting collaborative dialogic interaction.

Object of analysis Learning activity Assessment points (max 12)
Acoustic representation of some words and pronunciation difficulties Naming, analysing 3 Lexical rephrasing and synonymous substitution Naming, analysing 3

Intonation of utterances of various communicative purposes
Pronouncing 3 Sustaining the dialogue Suggesting 3 The assessing of learning outcomes was carried out in two stages. At the assessment stage 1, all the students orally performed сollaborative dialogue analysis (CDA) of the sample dialogues, given by the teacher. Despite the individual form of task completion, interaction with the examiner was encouraged. At the assessment stage 2, students were encouraged to produce their collaborative dialogues in pairs. There were several tasks for making up collaborative dialogues on various professional topics (See Appendix 1).
The criteria to assess dialogic interactive speaking skills (DISS) in collaborative dialogic performing (CDP) were identified in terms of text production and spoken interaction (Table 2). Diversity of grammatical and lexical devices for reaching mutual understanding between the dialogue participants 2 Interlocutor's speaking initialisation 1 Background knowledge deduction 1 Reaching consensus/problem solving 2 For example, speaking tempo refers to the text production whereas interlocutor's speaking initialisation signifies speaking interaction. The criteria list: a) corresponds to the descriptors of overall spoken interaction, in accordance with CEFR (CEFR, 2001), b) is based on the assumption by Swain (2000) about assessing language skills through collaborative dialogic interaction, c) is relevant to Jenks' (2012) recommendations for textual analysis in dialogic interaction.
Collaborative dialogue performing was assessed according to a 12-point scale which is familiar to Ukrainian learners. According to this scale, maximum 2 points for rephrasing, for example, were awarded if a student demonstrated the active use of language units such as: Can you say it in another way?; So what you mean to say is…; What you're saying is…; Let me get this straight…, etc. An additional 2 points were awarded for reaching collaborative consensus. Thus, in total, the students could get a maximum of 12 points under assessing both speaking competence and dialogic interaction.
The teachers were observing, in turn, the individual work of the participants and their pairing dialogical interactions.

Results
The objectives of collaborative dialogic speaking skills assessment targeted at: 1skills of CDA and 2 -DISS. The results obtained proved the interrelatedness of technical English speaking skills formation and collaborative dialogic skills development in experiential teaching ESP to tertiary school students (See Table 3). It is clear from the above-given table that the level of DISS achieved by the students is quite homogenous and may be identified as high. Such close agreement between the scores which mark learning outcomes in two types of learning activities made it possible for us to infer the stable interdependence between interactive dialogic skills formation and technical language proficiency advancement. In addition to this, students' general oral production competence was also assessed at the end of the semester and it is also quite substantial and varies from 9 to 11 points (See Table 4): Post-experimental students' questioning reaffirmed the teaching outcomes in terms of collaborative dialogic speaking skills formation. The assessment proved that the students:  can make the list of the most general issues that every specialist in the areas of technology has to know how to solve in English;  can analyse collaborative dialogue structure in order to solve a communicative problem;  can identify the strategies of participation in collaborative dialogic interaction;  can single out the vocabulary typical of each professional situation to be used.

Discussion
It is worth emphasising that at the end of the course students' dialogic speaking skills development was assessed in accordance with the procedure offered by Brooks (2009). According to it, test-takers took part in two tests on oral proficiency: one in which they interacted with an examiner (the individual format) and one in which they interacted with another student (the paired format). Students were additionally informed that according to the communicative task, they had to strategically communicate to achieve a common goal. These requirements correspond to collaborative dialogic interaction in contrast to the conflict dialogue that is more frequently used in tests (Caspersen, 2015). Developing this idea in our study, we attempted to interpret students' skills as techniques of collaborative dialogic interaction.
During the experiment carried out by the authors the students demonstrated among others, the skills to apply collaborative dialogue support techniques which are essential for oral production training. Sustaining collaborative dialogic interaction skills were assessed by us according to the set of criteria offered by Zeng and Takatsuka (2009), each criterion, if properly applied, was awarded 1 point (p. 442): inviting opinion, requesting for assistance, correcting, self-correcting, suggesting improvement, reminding, stating an opinion, providing an alternative, requesting clarification, using synonyms, expressing disagreement or disagreement, checking confirmation.
The experimental use of collaborative dialogue techniques in ESP teaching and assessment has confirmed a positive effect of the supporting dialogue interaction techniques on the development of oral production competence in students; they completed the tasks given with high scores for both text analysis and sustaining oral collaborative interaction.
The importance of students' reliance on their own professional knowledge in the process of tasks completion was especially tangible at assessment stage 2 of the collaborative dialogue performance. As shown in the given research, in the process of collaboration students learned more quickly and efficiently to find and use the vocabulary they needed for the utterance production in the dialogue. However, it should be noted that in order to work in pairs, it was necessary to select students with the same level of proficiency and vocabulary acquisition. We may conclude that applying collaborative dialogic techniques contributes greatly to foreign language general professional development. In this sense, we deepen the understanding of collaborative dialogic interaction as a powerful tool of second language teaching (Swain & Watanabe, 2013). In other words, the need for dialogic consensus facilitates collaborative dialogic skills formation, evokes creativity in interactional techniques use and develops foreign language professional speaking skills.

Conclusions
Making use of collaborative dialogic interactions as both a medium of instruction and an assessment tool has a conceptual value for various educational systems. With this type of assessment procedure, the students boost their linguistic knowledge, recognise their language gaps and settle misunderstandings. The main learning outcome of applying collaborative dialogic interaction is the desire of students and teachers to be interesting interlocutors for each other, to work on language improvement in order to sustain adequate dialogue. The criteria, singled out for the assessment of collaborative dialogic interaction, are adequate and sufficient. Collaborative dialogue interaction enables practising stylistic and etiquette conventions of English as well as using a diversity of grammatical and lexical devices for reaching mutual understanding between the dialogue participants, listening to the interlocutor, interlocutor's speaking initialisation, and reaching consensus/problem solving. The analysis of students' own achievements under collaborative dialogic interaction has led to the conclusion about the positive effect of dialogic interaction on the development of speaking competence. The perspective of future studies in this sphere lies in further elaboration of the criteria for assessing collaborative dialogic interaction for different levels of foreign language competences well as investigating the possible impact of gender and different levels of communicative competence formation on reaching dialogic consensus. Topic "Selling goods/products/equipment of one's own organisation/company" Student A Student B

Appendix 1. Sample tasks for making up collaborative dialogues
You are your company's trade agent selling computer software. You are now talking to an attendee of your booth at the fair who is interested in buying the software that you are offering. Your goal is to persuade the potential customer that buying the product from your company would be the right decision. Use the techniques of persuasion described in the previous exercise.
You are an attendee at a trade fair. You like the software that they are offering and may order it if you are persuaded that it would be the best decision to order the products from just this company. Listen to the arguments of the company's representative; ask him/her all the questions that may interest you. Make a decision on the basis of what you hear and inform your interlocutor of your decision.
Topic "Participating in professional/business fairs and exhibitions" Student A Student B You are your company's representative at a trade fair. Your company manufactures the products that you know well (it may be your favourite mobile phone, or your bike, or your DVD-player at home, or whatever other object that you like and use yourselfthe choice is yours). You are now talking to an attendee of your booth at the fair who is interested in buying a large stock of products that you are offering. His/her order is going to be for his/her company that sells such products. Your goal is to persuade the potential customer that buying these goods from your company would be the right decision.
You are an attendee at a trade fair. You represent a company that sells the goods manufactured by the company of the person to whom you are now talking in his/her booth at the fair. You like the products that they are offering and may order an entire stock of them if you are persuaded that it would be the best decision to order the products from just this company. Listen to the arguments of the company's representative; ask him/her all the questions that may interest you. Make a decision on the basis of what you hear and inform your interlocutor of your decision.