ASSESSING SPEAKING SKILLS

There are some key questions to ask yourself:

 Why am I testing? ----- The purpose of the test

 Who am I testing? ------Who are the test takers?
 What am I testing? ------The specific speaking skill (subskill)
 How am I testing? -------The different tasks in the test
 How am I scoring? -------How to assign marks
 How is my test benefiting learners? --------Impact of test in learning

Types of speaking to Test:

► IMITIATIVE, performance is the ability to simply parrot back (imitative) a word or

phrase or possibility a sentence. The only role of listening here is in the short-term storage
of a prompt, just long enough to allow the speaker to retain the short stretch of language
that must be imitated.

► INTENSIVE, it employed in assessment contexts is the production of short stretch of oral

language designed to demonstrated competence in a narrow band of grammatical, phrasal,
lexical, or phonological relationships. The speaker must be aware of semantic properties to
be able respond, but interaction with an interlocutor or test administrator is minimal at best.

► RESPONSIVE, it includes interaction and test comprehension but at the somewhat limited
level or very short conversation, standard greetings and small talk, simple requests and
comments, and the like.

► INTERACTIVE, the difference between responsive and

interactive speaking is in the length and complexity of the
interaction, which sometimes includes multiple exchangesand/or
multiple participants.

► EXTENSIVE (monologue), extensive oral production tasks include speeches, oral

presentations, and storytelling, during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners
is either highly limited or ruled out altogether.

Micro- and Macro speaking skills to tested

Micro- and Macro of Speaking

The micro-skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such s phonemes,
morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units.

The macro-skills imply the speaker's focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse,
function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options.
A. Designing Assessment Tasks: Imitative Speaking

1# Word and sentence repetition tasks (L,S)

 Test-takers hear: repeat after me:

Beat pause bit pause
Bat pause vat pause
I bought a boat yesterday
The glow of the candle is growing
When did they go on vacation?
Do you like coffee?
Test-takers repeat the stimulus.

Scoring scale for repetition tasks:

2 acceptable pronunciations
1 comprehensible, partially, correct pronunciation
0 silence, seriously, incorrect pronunciation

The longer the stretch of a language, the more possibility for error and therefore the more
difficult it becomes to assign a point system to the text.
B. Designing Assessment Tasks:

Intensive Speaking

1# Directed Responsive Tasks

The administrator elicits a particular grammatical form or a transformation of a sentence, but

they do require minimal processing of meaning in order to produce the correct grammatical
output.

 Test-takers

hear (L.S)

Tell me he went home.

Tell me that like rock music.
Tell me that you aren't interested in tennis.

2# Read-Aloud tasks

▸ Intensive read-aloud tasks include reading beyond the sentence level up to paragraph or
two.

▸ Teachers listening to the recording would then rate students on a number of phonological
factors (vowels, diphthongs, consonants, stress, and intonation) by completing a two-page
diagnostic checklist on which all error or questionable items were noted.

Some variations on the task of simply reading a short

passage:

Reading a scripted dialogue

Reading sentences containing minimal pairs

Reading information from a table or chart

 Dialogue or sentence completion

Interviewer : what did you do last weekend?

Test-taker: _____

Interviewer: what did you do after you graduated from this program?

Test-taker:

Interviewer:

Test-taker:

: I was in japan for two weeks.

: it's ten thirty.

Test-takers respond with an appropriate lines.

Picture Cued Elicitation

These pictures are used to elicit information. They could elicit adjectives, nouns, future
tense, past tense, giving directions or descriptions.

Translation

Translation is a meaningful communicative device in contexts in which the English-user is

called on to be an interpreter.

The test-taker is given a native-language word, phrase, or

sentence and is asked to translate it.

C. Designing Assessment Tasks: Responsive Speaking

1# Question & Answer

 Question & answer can consist of one or two questions from an interviewer or they
can make up a portion of a whole battery of questions and prompts in an oral
interview.
 The first question is intensive in its purpose: it is a display question intended to elicit a
predetermined correct response.
 Questions at the responsive level tend to be genuine referential questions in which the
test-taker is given more opportunity to produce meaningful language in response.
Responsive question may take following forms:

Questions eliciting open-ended responses Test takers hear: 1. what do you think about the

weather today?

2. why did you choose your academic major? What kind of strategies have you used to help
you learn English?

Test-takers respond with a few sentences at most

 2# Giving Instructions and Directions

The technique is simple: the administrator poses the problem, and test taker responds.
Scoring is based primarily on comprehensibility, and secondary on other specified
grammatical or discourse categories. The choice of topics needs to be familiar enough so that
the test is not general knowledge but linguistic competence. Finally, the task should require
the test-taker to produce at least five or six sentences.

Eliciting instructions or

direction Test-takers hear:

Describe how to make a typical dish from your country?

How do you access e-mail on a PC? Test-takers respond with appropriate instruction.

3# Paraphrasing

The test-takers read or hear a short story or description with a limited number of sentences
(perhaps two or five) and produce a paraphrase of the story. The advantages is they elicit short
stretches of output and perhaps tap into test takers' to practice the conversational art of
conciseness by reducing the output/ input ratio.

D. Designing Assessment Tasks: Interactive Speaking

#1 Interview

A test administrator and a test-taker sit down in a direct face-to-face. exchange and proceed
through a protocol of questions and directives.

#2 Role Play

It frees students to be somewhat creative in their linguistic output. In some versions, role
play allows some rehearsal time so that students can map out what they are going to say. It
also has the effect of lowering anxieties as students can, even for few moments, take on the
persona of someone other than themselves.

The test administrator must determine the assessment objectives of the role play then devise
a scoring technique that appropriately pinpoints those adjectives.

# 3 Discussion and Conversation

Discussion may be especially appropriate tasks through which

 elicit and observe such abilities: Topic nomination, maintenance, and termination.

Attention getting, interrupting, control

Clarifying, questioning, paraphrasing

Comprehension signals

Negotiating meaning

Intonation patterns for pragmatic effect

Kinesics, eye contact, proxemics, body language

Politeness, and other sociolinguistics factors

4. Games

Crossword puzzles, information gap

E. Designing Assessment Tasks: Extensive

Speaking1# Oral Presentations

The rules for effective assessment must be involved:

Specify the criterion Set appropriate tasks

Elicit optimal output

Establish practical, reliable scoring process

For oral presentation, a checklist or grid is a common mears of scoring or evaluation. The
wash back effect of a such checklist can be enhanced by written comments from the teacher,
a conference with the teacher, peer evaluation using the same form, and self assessment.

2# Picture-Cued Storytelling

It considers a picture or a series of pictures as a stimulus for a longer story or description.

3# Retelling a Story, News Event [L, R, S] Test-takers hear or read a story or news event
that they are asked to retell.

The objectives in assigning is listening comprehension of the

original to production of a number of oral discourse features

(sequences and relationship of events, stress and emphasis

pattern), fluency, and interaction with the hearer.

► Scoring should meet the intended criteria.

4# Translation (of Extended Prose)

The longer texts are presented for the test-taker to read in the native language and then translate
into English. Those texts could come in many forms: dialogue, directions for assembly
product, a synopsis of a story, etc.

The advantage: control the content, vocabulary, and the grammatical and discourse features.