Fluency, Then the Freeze: An Interpersonal Speaking Score
You administer a two-minute interpersonal speaking task to 24 French 4 students. You play a lycée secretary; the student is an exchange student trying to change sections. Camille, your strongest writer, opens with « Salut, ça va ? » and uses tu with you throughout. Her sentences are fluent and well formed - a rehearsed-sounding paragraph about her host family - and she stops dead when you ask an unscripted question: « Et votre professeur principal, il est au courant ? » Ten seconds pass. She says « Je ne comprends pas » and stops talking. Her written work sits at Intermediate High, consistent with a 4–5 on your rubric, and her recorded monologues are the best in the class.
1. Camille's performance has failed twice over. Name the two failures and say which one your rubric actually captures.
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Failure 1 - sociocultural register. « Salut, ça va ? » plus tu to an adult in an institutional role is a relationship error, not a grammar error. The French is correct; the address is wrong. Note the aggravating detail: she opens with it, so she has set the terms before hearing anything from the interlocutor.
Failure 2 - interactional competence. She produced a monologue, then stopped when the interlocutor deviated. She could not parse an unscripted question and had no repair move beyond a flat statement of non-comprehension. Crucially, she did not ask for repetition, reformulation, or time - and she did not attempt an answer from partial comprehension.
Which the rubric captures: almost certainly only the second, and probably badly. A rubric with fluency / accuracy / vocabulary / comprehensibility will score her highly, because on those criteria she genuinely is strong. Nothing in that list penalises wrong address, and nothing rewards attempting a repair - so the one thing she did right (admitting non-comprehension rather than bluffing) is invisible.
The judgement: the freeze is the higher-stakes failure, because interaction is the construct being tested. The register failure matters, but it is a discrete, teachable item.
2. How do you score this, and what do you do about the freeze specifically - in the moment and after?
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In the moment: do not rescue her by simplifying into English or by rephrasing until she nods. Repeat once, slightly slower, unchanged: « Est-ce que votre professeur principal est au courant ? » If she still stalls, move on and note the timestamp. Rescuing converts an interpersonal task into a listening task, and destroys the evidence.
Scoring:
- Language control: at target (4–5 band).
- Task completion: partial. She never established the request or responded to a follow-up, which is most of the task.
- Register: bottom band. Two marks, not one - greeting and pronoun.
- Interaction/repair: partial credit, deliberately. « Je ne comprends pas » is a repair initiation; what is missing is the second move (asking for reformulation, or answering partially). Score the initiation, dock the follow-through.
After:
- Play her the recording and ask her to name the moment it went wrong, before you say anything. She will identify the unscripted question unprompted.
- Give her three repair phrases to automatise: « Pardon, vous pouvez répéter ? » / « Vous voulez dire que… ? » / « Excusez-moi, je n'ai pas bien compris la question. »
- Re-run a 30-second version of the same exchange two weeks later, with a different unscripted question, and score only the repair behaviour.
The lesson: she has been rewarded all year for production, and has never been taught that comprehension failure is a move, not an ending.
3. What instructional change follows from this - for Camille and for the class?
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The diagnosis: Camille's strength is monologic production and her weakness is co-constructed talk. Her best-in-class recordings are a symptom, not a comfort - she has been practising the format she is already good at. A class average that hides this is a curriculum problem, not a Camille problem.
Three changes:
- Kill the scripted role-play. Replace with two-minute exchanges where the teacher-interlocutor has a mandatory surprise move at the 60-second mark: a contradictory piece of information, a request for clarification, a change of topic. Students know it is coming; they do not know what it is.
- Teach vous as the default, explicitly. Not "French people are formal" - teach it as: you start with vous and the other person offers tu. Drill the two-sentence opening of any institutional encounter until it is automatic.
- Grade repair separately. Add a rubric line for "negotiates meaning when comprehension fails," so that a student who says « Pardon, vous pouvez répéter ? » scores above one who guesses or goes silent. If it isn't on the rubric, it isn't in the class.
What to keep: her fluency is real and should be named as such in feedback. The message is not that she is bad at French - it is that she has been speaking at people rather than with them, and this task was the first to ask for the second.