Assessing Speaking
I teach a number of oral communications classes, and I’m fortunate enough to have freedom to set my own assessments (to a well thought out set of class aims). So what to do?
With higher level classes, which tend to hang around themes, we do presentations. I like the fact they have to go off and research (and we work hard on finding alternatives to wikipedia and analysing the sources). I favour the test / teach approach; I like to let them try first then help them get better, rather than just telling them what to do. Because of that, students usually start out terrified; locked to a script, voice barely above a whisper…. but end up feeling great and knocking ten minute presentations out of the park with barely a note card. I like that feeling too - I don’t think you can underestimate confidence. I also have peer and self-assessment activities and here, too, I can see the students grow in their understanding of what they are doing and how they can improve.
Misgivings? Well, how often do people give presentations? (EFL geeks aside ; P). The vocabulary they learn, the critical thinking skills they hone… all great. But we spend a lot of time working towards these assesments of an oral communication skill which, actually, they probably don’t need. One might argue (and I do) that not everything learnt in the classroom needs to be vocational. Nonetheless….
In other classes, I’ve been doing a lot more of these conversation transcription activities. The students record a conversation, take it home and listen to it, transcribe it, correct mistakes and assess performance. Duane Kindt has an excellent template for transcription here (in fact, have a look around his whole site). What I like about this, apart from the reflective element and the multiple learning styles recycling, is the fact that the students are assessed on “real” communication. Throughout the semester, we focus on backchannel, interjections and the other little conversational gambits we use to keep the shuttlecock in the air. In fact, I took to giving them a check list of “really“‘s and “so I said“‘s to tot up from class to class. One danger is that the students over rehearse and end up scripting the whole tranaction, missing , and the point. It is important to get across that the assessment is not (just) of the conversation itself, but of their own assessment of the conversation.
Aside from this, I’ve had some success with role plays. We looked at poverty in one class, but it was only when the students really had to play a role as a homeless person, telling their story from research, that I think the seriousness of the day to day difficulties of the very poor became real. Again, aside from the language benefits I liked the social element.
What I would really like to do is some kind of interview assessment, but with classes of about thirty that looks challenging.
How do you assess speaking? Is fluency, accuracy, “communicative commpetence”, pronunciation, content, or something else the most important element?
