Assessing Speaking Skill

Assessment is an integral aspect of the teaching learning process and happens everyday in the

classroom as teachers continually make judgments about the performance of their students.

(Burns and joyce, 1999: 102)

An essential step in preparing for oral language assessment is planning

how to engage students in `self-assessment`. According to O`Malley and Pierce

(1996:66), by providing learners with the skill needed to independently monitor

their learning, teachers enable them to take a greater responsibility for that

learning. Self-assessment may take various forms. It can take the form of yes

/no statements, question/answer, rating scales, sentence completion, and learning logs.

These are not typically graded or scored by teachers. Instead, they are used to focus learners to

their performance and progress in learning.

Additionally, setting criteria is a crucial part of assessment; without criteria or standards of

performance, performance tasks remain simply a collection of instructional activities (Herman,

Aschabacher, & Winters in O`Malley & Pierce 1996: 65). Teachers can establish criterion level

of oral language proficiency based on the goals and objectives of classroom instruction before

using instructional activities for assessment. Teachers then can set criterion level by designing a

scoring rubric, rating scale, or checklist. Teachers need to check the dimension or aspects of oral

language that they want to assess. Gonzales Pino reminds us, in O`Malley & Pierce (1996:

65) that the dimensions or features of oral language to be assessed depends on the level of

proficiency of the class and instructional goals. Besides, for classroom teachers, standards may

be used to monitor students ` performance, to determine who needs extra help, or to assign
grades. If instead of holistic scale, teachers are using analytical scales, they will need to

determine what scores meet the criteria or each dimension of performance. Brown,2004: 173

proposes oral proficiency scoring which might be used to assess oral language.The following

scoring scales are actually suitable to use in the Senior High School students. The learners are

tested on content, organization, grammar, pronunciation and fluency. They may get a maximum

of twenty five points on each of these five points and one hundred points in all. The scale score

of testing speaking can be seen in table 2.

Table 2.

The analyt

ical