Key Tools and Their Significance: Speaking Assessment

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Types Speaking Skills Assessment and the Ways of Assessing Them

As a rule, several types of speaking are identified. These include Imitative, Intensive, Responsive, Interactive, and Extensive Speaking categories (Isaacs, 2016). Each of the specified aspects of an ability to communicate needs to be evaluated with the help of a respective tool. Therefore, a comprehensive approach toward speaking skills evaluation is required to determine the degree of a student’ proficiency in the English language. It is critical for an interlocutor to provide the consistent support for a test-taker throughout the assessment process. Thus, a learner will be capable of demonstrating the full extent of their abilities.

Assessment-Related Assignments (Intensive Speaking): Details

One should distinguish between the micro-and macroskills of speaking. According to Luoma (2004), microskills include the ability to produce minor speech elements, such as morphemes, lexemes, and phrasal units. Macroskills, in turn, imply the ability to create a dialogue and select the appropriate morphemes, lexemes, and phrases according to a particular situation (Hughes, 2003). Therefore, to create an assignment involving the evaluation of a learner’s kills, one should design the scenario that implies imitating speaking.

Assessment-Related Assignments (Intensive Speaking): Strategies

Read-aloud tasks, the tasks that encourage students to complete specific conversations, and the picture-cued assignments can be seen as some of the most common types of evaluating learners’ ability to speak the English language fluently and use appropriate words and phrases in a context. Therefore, the proposed techniques should be incorporated into the process of evaluating their abilities and their general understanding of the English language. Providing read-aloud stimuli is the key to encouraging a student to accept the assignment and deploy their creative and linguistic skills in order to start discourse (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010).

Elements of the Speaking Assessment Process

It is also essential to use visual elements to incorporate prompts for students into assignments. For example, by selecting the images that share a particular characteristic, one will be able to assist a learner in characterizing the specified items based on their grammatical categories. As a result, a student develops an intuitive understanding of the language. Furthermore, map-cued elicitations can be used during the assessment process as an important visual prompt (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). As a result, a learner develops the ability to integrate the information from the instructions into the answer.

Assessment-Related Assignments (Responsive Speaking): Question and Answer

Responsive speaking (RS) is one of the most common techniques employed for testing. The specified approach invites the opportunity for a test-taker (TT) to converse with an interlocutor directly (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). As a rule, the questions-and-answers (Q&A) technique is used in the specified scenario. There are two primary strategies for creating tasks for assessing learners’ knowledge with the help of Q&A. Open-ended questions offer significant flexibility to a test-taker, inviting them to address several issues within a single response (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). Close-ended questions limit the time consumed by the test yet provide a lesser insight into the test-taker’s knowledge of the subject (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010).

Strategies for Providing Instructions and Directions for Learners

In order to create the environment in which a TT will feel comfortable and inclined to demonstrate their skills, one will need to offer instructions and directions to them. The specified step is particularly important during the Q&A process. It is also critical to predict the instances that may require clarifications and, thus provide them beforehand. The specified process involves providing a TT with a stimulus for starting the conversation and offering their response to an interlocutor’s question. Although the specified instructions can be provided orally, it would be best to combine the use of printed assignment details and oral clarifications.

Assessment-Related Assignments (Responsive Speaking): Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is another common technique for determining a learner’s ability to grasp the material and prove their understanding thereof. The process involves rendering the key points of a short story after reading it (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). The specified task encompasses the evaluation of a learner’s listening, and speaking abilities simultaneously. Particularly, a learner receives the information aurally and then interprets it orally. Alternatively, a text can be provided to a learner in a printed form so that they could demonstrate their reading and speaking skills. By limiting the amount of a paraphrased text to several sentences, an interlocutor sets the criteria for either passing or failing the assignment.

Assessment-Related Assignments (Responsive Speaking): Test for Spoken English (TSE)

It would be wrong to claim that the Test for Spoken English (TSE) belongs to either RS or Interactive Speaking (IS). Incorporating the elements of both, it provides a means of exploring a TT’s ability to address different topics and evaluating their skills regarding phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). Among the advantages of the TSE, one should mention its applicability for testing the performance of both native and nonnative learners (O’Sullivan, 2014). The rating scale for the TSE helps to embrace the aspects of communication such as its functions, the appropriateness of the response, coherence, and pronunciation.

Assessment-Related Assignments (Interactive Speaking): Interview

IS, as well is Extensive Speaking, allow students to display their degree of their mastering the English language at a longer duration. Furthermore, a TT interacts with the interlocutor less actively. An interview should be seen as one of the key frameworks for IS. The specified assessment types vary in length extensively, depending on the goals and themes thereof (Isaac, 2016). However, interviews also involve the support of an interlocutor. Specifically, the latter guides a student through the following stages of an interview: warm-up, level-check, probe, and wind-down (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). The Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) is an example of the interview-based assessment tools for learners (O’Sullivan, 2014).

Assessment-Related Assignments (Interactive Speaking): Role Play

The process of assessing learners’ skills should be designed in the way that would remove the constraints preventing students from demonstrating their abilities. For this purpose, games should be incorporated into the evaluation of students’ skills.

Assessment-Related Assignments (Interactive Speaking): Games

Games should also be seen as an important part of the assessment process since they incite learners’ ability to apply their creative thinking skills to test assignments. Particularly, games may include the tasks that make learners structure their speech in accordance with the existing grammatical rules and using the basic vocabulary. The specified approach is known as the “Tinkertoy game” (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010). Alternatively, learners can be provided with the games that require using the available vocabulary abstractly, such as crossword puzzles. Information gap grids will help to determine the students’ ability to place specific words and syntagmas in a context (Isaac, 2016).

Assigning a Score: Challenges of Using Assessment Tools

One should also bear in mind that the available knowledge evaluation methods have certain problems. For example, an interview as an assessment strategy allows determining the degree of a student’s proficiency based on the fluency of their speech. The tasks involving filling out gaps, in turn, show a learner’s capability of contextualizing information. However, each assessment tool has its problems, and a teacher needs to be able to address the specified concerns (Isaac, 2016).

Assessment Creation: Intensive and Imitative Speaking

The evaluation of Intensive and Imitative Speaking skills is also critical for the analysis of learners’ ability to communicate in English. The specified skills can be defined as the ability to use the provided prompts to develop an idea and follow the provided speech patterns to develop an intrinsic understanding of the language (Hughes, 2003). Thus, applying the tools that will allow evaluating a student’s ability to use Intensive and Imitative Speaking skills is critical to the further progress of a learner. Intensive and Imitative Speaking evaluation tasks typically include tasks involving descriptions.

Assessment Creation: Extensive Speaking

Extensive speaking implies that students are provided with an opportunity to showcase their speaking skills by structuring discourse independently. As a rule, a learner is suggested to talk on a particular topic and create a coherent narrative that also utilizes grammatically correct tools for the expression of a speaker’s opinion. Traditionally, prompts are used to establish the general guidelines for students and provide a starting point for the student to use. Picture-cued storytelling is often utilized to encourage a learner to develop a narrative independently. In other scenarios, a student may use a preexisting story to retell it or to translate a narrative from their language to English.

References

Brown, H. D., & Abeywickrama, P. (2010). Language assessment: Principles and classroom practices. NY: Pearson Education.

Hughes, A. (2003). Testing for language teachers (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Isaacs, T. (2016). Assessing speaking. In Tsagari, D., & Banerjee, J. (Eds.), Handbook of second language assessment (pp. 131-146). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

O’Sullivan, B. (2014). Assessing speaking. In A. J. Kunnan (Ed.), The companion to language assessment (pp. 156-171). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Luoma, S. (2004). Assessing speaking. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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