ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute OBJECTIVES You will understand: 1. The challenges of assessing student speaking ability. 2. Various techniques for assessing student speaking. You will be able to: 1. Design effective speaking assessments for your students.

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute ASSESSING SPEAKING Speaking is the most challenging of all of the skills to assess, for three reasons.  First, without the use of recording devices, it is difficult to accurately assess students in the short time it takes them to produce the language verbally.  Second, assessing speaking reliably is a labour-intensive task. Speaking is best assessed one-on-one or two-on-one, which is a stark contrast to the student-teacher ratios you can achieve with a listening or reading test.  Finally, there is no right or wrong answer for most speaking question because they are open-ended, making objectivity and consistency hard to achieve. Answers fall on a scale of completely incomprehensible to a native-speaker response level. Assessing student recordings may even require multiple run-throughs and/or multiple assessors.

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute QUESTION TYPES The most reliable speaking question types are those that mimic real-life communication situations. These are called direct questions, because they directly measure skill in a real-life situation. This is in contrast to indirect questions, which measure the language knowledge underlying performance in a real-life situation. Direct questions are all integrated, open-ended questions, as opposed to discrete, closed questions.

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute Some sample questions/tasks are as follows:  Questions about the student him or herself  Questions that have the student find information from another student or the assessor  Decision-making/problem-solving or opinion questions  Role plays  Compare and contrast questions about pictures or scenarios

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute ASSESSMENT PROCEDURES The following are some possible procedures for assessing student speaking:  Interview students one-on-one outside of class time or on the telephone  Interview students one-on-one during class time, while other students complete an individual or group task  Interview students in pairs or small groups  Have the entire class work in pairs or groups for an extended period of time and monitor the performance of each pair/group in turn  Have students record their responses simultaneously in a language/ computer lab  Have students complete an online test on their own time and record their answers

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute Some Examples of Standardized Testing Systems: The two most widely used standardized testing systems for assessing student speaking ability—the University of Cambridge exams and the TOEFL—have two very different assessment procedures. The University of Cambridge conducts assessments live, assessing two candidates at once, with two evaluators for every two candidates. One evaluator conducts the assessment, asking questions and assigning tasks. The other evaluator listens, takes notes and acts as the primary evaluator. With the TOEFL iBT, student responses are recorded via the internet and captured as a digital file. The digital file is then forwarded to two assessors. A strict time limit is imposed on student responses; when time is up, the computer stops recording.

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute MARKING SCHEMES: RUBRICS Assessing the productive skills has always been a challenge for language teaching professionals. The most effective question type—open-ended— is the most difficult to assess objectively, and there are multiple dimensions to speaking that affect comprehensibility. Assessors cannot just randomly assign a number to a student’s answer. This is particularly true of speaking rather than writing assessments, because the evaluator usually only has one opportunity to hear the student’s production. In the past, evaluators have used sliding scales of numbers for different aspects of speech production (fluency, accuracy, complexity, content, etc.), or have simply assessed speech production as adequate or inadequate. With many assessments now being high-stakes, and with students demanding transparency in the marking schemes, these methods are no longer adequate. Many institutions are moving towards rubrics as an answer to these challenges.

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute A rubric is a set of rating descriptors that adds a qualitative and descriptive aspect to a quantitative marking system: ScoreFluencyAccuracy 3 o Few hesitations, pauses or breaks. o Well-paced delivery. o Sounds pronounced correctly. o Appropriate intonation and stress. o Correct use of simple present and simple past. o Correct use of vocabulary to describe hobbies, likes and dislikes. 2 o Hesitations, pauses or breaks that occasionally disrupt communication. o Delivery occasionally slows down so that listener attention is lost. o Some sounds and words difficult to understand. o Intonation and stress sometimes impede meaning. o Some correct use of simple present and simple past. o Some correct use of vocabulary to describe hobbies, likes and dislikes. 1 o Lengthy hesitations, pauses or breaks that impede understanding of ideas. o Delivery is very slow so that listener attention is lost. o Most sounds and words difficult to understand. o Intonation and stress frequently impede meaning. o Use of simple present and simple past is incorrect. o Use of vocabulary to describe hobbies, likes and dislikes is incorrect or lacking altogether.

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute A Final Note on Rubrics The key point with rubrics is to ensure that students are aware of the descriptions that accompany the ratings. Students should receive a copy of the rubric, and can even be asked to conduct a self-assessment in order to familiarize themselves with the rubric descriptions. An example of an institution that has moved towards a rubric system for evaluating the productive skills is ETS, with the internet-based TOEFL (iBT). The iBT uses rubrics for both the speaking and the writing components of the test. The rubric for speaking has a 0 to 4 rating system for three aspects of a student’s speaking performance: delivery, language use, and topic development. There are extensive resources available on the internet for rubrics, including actual rubrics to use and software tools with which to build rubrics. A good place to start is the website:

ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute Combine Task Journal question 2 and submit via to or (preferred) or print and hand in.