Grammatical complexity and lexical diversity in official oral examinations at B2 of the CEFR: the case of FCE and Official Language Schools in Spain

Official examinations of English for speakers of other languages resort to substantially different tasks in order to assess oral proficiency. However, there is a lack of studies specifically comparing the language features elicited in oral tasks from different official examinations with the same population. This study compares measures of grammatical complexity and lexical diversity in the peer-peer interactions of 10 adult L1-Spanish learners of English performing one task from Cambridge’s First Certificate in English (FCE), and a B2 task from the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas (EOI, Spain) speaking tests. The results reveal statistically significant differences both at both grammatical and lexical levels. The ratio of dependent clauses to the total number of clauses was statistically significantly higher in the FCE task. Conversely, the EOI task elicited a significantly more varied lexicon from participants than the FCE task. The study sheds light on the potential of the FCE and EOI tasks to generate comparatively higher levels of grammatical complexity and lexical diversity respectively and highlights the need for further empirical research comparing different oral task samples from official language tests within the same population.