Wuxi Mandarin Education School in Jiangsu province hosted China's first Oral Proficiency Interview-Computer (OPIc), an Internet-delivered test designed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), on July 31.
More than 20 candidates from different backgrounds took the test, jointly organized by ACTFL, Chinese Testing International, a Chinese testing service company sponsored by Confucius Institute Headquarters, and Wuxi Mandarin Education School.
OPIc has been developed by ACTFL in response to the increased demand for the testing of oral language proficiency worldwide. It provides valid and reliable oral proficiency testing on a large scale, in languages such as English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. Test-takers' oral proficiency will be assessed through a carefully designed computer program that emulates a real time interview environment.
OPIc has been widely acknowledged worldwide by academic institutions, governments and enterprises, as a measure for student assessment, recruitment, promotion and qualification.
More than 3,000 global enterprises credit the test, including NASA, American e-commerce giant eBay, PayPal, a worldwide online payments service provider, South Korean multinational conglomerate Samsung, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).
