Designing Assessment Task: 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. Tests takers will perform at
their best if they are led through four stages.
For level stages :
 Warm up, preliminary small talk to make test-taker become comfortable with the
situation. No scoring of this phase takes place.
 Level check, a series of pre-planned questions.
 Probe, probe questions and prompts challenge test-taker to go to the heights of
their ability, to extend beyond the limits of the interview’s expectation through
increasingly difficult questions.
 Wind down, a final phase of interview. No scoring for this part

The success of an oral interview will depend on :

 Clearly specifying administrative procedure of the assessment. (practically)

 Focusing the questions and probes on the purpose (validity)
 Appropriately eliciting an optimal amount and quality of oral production from the
test-taker (biased for best performance)
 Creating a consistent, workable scoring system (reliability)

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 objective of the role play
then devise a scoring technique that appropriately pinpoints those adjectives.

3. Discussion and Conversation

Discussion may be especially appropriate task through which elicit and observe such
abilities:
 Topic nomination, maintenance, and termination
 Attention getting, interrupting, floor holding, control
 Clarifying, questioning, paraphrasing
 Comprehension signals (nodding, “uh-huh,””hmm,”etc.)
 Intonation patterns for pragmatic effect
 Kinesics, eye contact, proxemics, body language
 Politeness, and other sociolinguistics factors

4. Games
 Assessment games:
 Tinkertoy game
 Crossword puzzle
 Information gap
 City maps
 As assessment, the key is to specify a set of criteria and a reasonably practical and
reliable scoring method.

5. Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI)

 Original known as the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) test.
 In a series of the structured task, the OPI is carefully designed to elicit pronunciation,
fluency and integrative ability, sociolinguistic and cultural knowledge, grammar and
vocabulary.
 Valdman (1988) summed up the complaint:
“The OPI forces test-taker into a closed system where, because the interviewer in
endowed with full social control, they are unable to negotiate a social world……. In
short, the OPI can only inform us how learners can deal with an artificial social
imposition rather than enabling us to predict how they would be likely to manage
authentic linguistic interactions with target language native speakers.”