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It appears that students' capacity to express themselves in
written Spanish exceeds their capacity to express themselves orally.
An alternative explanation may also be that in spite of the training,
the Cuban raters had certain expectations for oral and written language
production. When the effect of pronunciation and intonation were
removed, the written expression met these expectations to a greater
degree than the oral. An additional explanation of the differences
between the oral and the written ratings is that the four stories which
the students were requested to retell are not actually parallel. Both
stories retold orally in English and Spanish are about a rock band
and are very similar in both languages. This similarity may provide a
degree of confusion for students who are just learning a second
language. The behavior of the two rock bands in these stories is
culturally different from Cuban behavioral norms. The two stories that
were retold in writing are widely dissimilar. The hotel story which
was retold in written English presents concepts about a capitalistic
society with which the newly arrived Cubans may be unfamiliar. Although
the Cubans said they had never heard the Mexican legend which was retold
in written Spanish, the ideas presented there were familiar to them.
None of the available language tests were normed on a population of
Cuban-Cubans.
Teachers' Ratings of Oral Proficiency
As an added measure of reliability, teachers were asked to rate
the students using the Oral Proficiency Rating Scale (Appendix F)
(Mace-Matluck, 1980, with adaptations to include the work of Damico et