Speaking skills

Speaking skills can be assessed by asking young learners questions and engaging them in conversations.
You can assess students by asking specific questions during class, as well as by talking with them on a
one-to-one basis. When assessing learners' oral skills, you may want to use an analytical or holistic
rubric. A holistic rubric provides one overall score. an analytical rubric provides information broken
down into different categories.' The Student Oral Language Observation Matrix in Figure 3 is an
analytical rubric used to assess speaking skills basis. you can use it to assess children informally, as part
of your daily instruction or for formal assessment.

The first category on the matrix, Comprehension, refers to hoth speaking and listening comprehension
because listening and speaking are intertwined. That is, you can't participate in a conversation if you
don't understand what has been said. Note that the matrix breaks the other aspects of oral language
into four categories: fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. The descriptors for each of the
categories are native speaker. Thus, students may score 5 on mastered all of the phonemes. That's OK.
Young native speakers haven't mastered them either. For more information on the phonemes which are
dif- ficult from a developmental standpoint, see Chapter 2 page 50. Look at Extract 1. The teacher and
the young learner are sitting together at a table. The teacher takes out a colorful picture of a family at
the beach and prompts the child to talk about the picture. The teacher wants to determine specifically
how well the child uses the present progressive tense (be + ing) The teacher carefully phrases her
questions using the present progressive with the hope that the student responds using the target
structure. As with all are extracts in this book, T stands for teacher and S stands for student.

The matrix in Figure 3 can help pinpoint the student's strengths and weaknesses even though the
conversation isn't long enough to provide a thorough picture of Cindy's English. Cindy comprehended
the questions very well. Her answers corresponded exactly with the questions. Cindy had trouble with
some of the vocabulary. The fact that she mixed desk and table is not that unusual depending upon the
types of desks in the classroom. She also made a grammatical error related to word order by putting the
adjective after the noun rather than before it (It is a desk blue). However, Cindy the present progressive
tense correctly From this conversation, the teacher not only determined Cindy to use the present
progressive but also that Cindy wa having some trouble with word order and pronouns. When you are
teaching, you will want to set up situations where children will be required to use a specific grammatical
construction. Remember, when you want to see how well children use a spesific aspect of the language,
you need to make sure that your question elicits the target construction.