No abstract

Abstract-Nowadays, language schools tend to include more of oral exams as part of their course completion assessment instruments in addition to traditional written exams. The major purpose of this study was accordingly to investigate the relationship between interviewers' gender, interview topic and oral performance. Thirty female upper-intermediate students were selected. All the participants were interviewed twice, once by a female and once by a male interviewer and each time they were required to talk about two topics, one gender-neutral and another gender-biased. All the performances were scored twice with an inter-rater reliability of +.88 and +.89 for two interviews respectively. A comparative analysis of the interview scores indicated that students achieved higher scores when interviewed by a female interviewer. With respect to interview topic, students performed better on gender-neutral topic.