ASSESSING SPEAKING

ASSESSING SPEAKING

BASIC TYPES OF SPEAKING

Ø  Imitative: (parrot back) testing the ability to imitate a word, phrase, and sentence Pronunciation is being tested. Examples: Word, phrase, sentence repetition.

Ø  Intensive: The purpose is producing short stretches of oral language. It is designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical, phrasal, lexical, phonological relationships (stress / rhythm / intonation) Examples of intensive assessment tasks include directed response task, reading aloud, sentence completion, limited picture cued tasks and sentence level translation.

Ø  Responsive: (Briefly interacting with the interlocutor) Responsive assessment tasks include interaction and test comprehension but at the somewhat limited level of very short conversations,standars greetings and small talk, simple requests and comments, and the like.

Ø  Interactive: The difference between responsive and interactive speaking is the length and complexity of the interaction, which sometimes includes multiple exchanges and/or multiple participants. Interaction in the form of either transactional language or interpersonal exchanges is tested. (In the three dialogues above A and B are transactional, and C is interpersonal. Examples: Interviews, role plays, games, discussions.

Ø  Extensive (monologue): Extensive oral production tasks include speeches, oral presentations, and story-telling, during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners is either highly limited (perhaps to nonverbal responses) or ruled out together.

Micro and macro Skills of Speaking

Micro skills of speaking

1. Pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough so that people can distinguish them. This includes making tonal distinctions.
2. Use stress and rhythmic patterns, and intonation patterns of the language clearly enough so that people can understand what is said.
3. Use the correct forms of words. This may mean, for example, changes in the tense, case, or gender.
4. Put words together in correct word order.
5. Use vocabulary appropriately.
6. Use the register or language variety that is appropriate to the situation and the relationship to the conversation partner.
7. Make clear to the listener the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, by whatever means the language uses.
8. Make the main ideas stand out from supporting ideas or information.
9. Make the discourse hang together so that people can follow what you are saying.

Macro Skills of Speaking

1. Appropriately accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals.
2. Use appropriate styles, registers, implicature, redundancies, pragmatic conventions, conversion rules, floor keeping and yielding, interrupting, and other sociolinguistic features in face-to-face conversations.
3. Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as focal and peripheral ideas, events and feeling, new information and given information, generalisation and examplification.
4. Convey facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language.
5. Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing  for help, and accurately assessing how well your interlocutor is understanding you.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: IMITATIVE SPEAKING

Imitative speaking refers to ability of the students in speaking performance of simply parrot back or imitates a word, phrase, or possibly a sentence. The appropriate assessment tasks for this level are:

·         Word repetition task

·         The scoring procedure is:2 for acceptable pronunciations 1 for comprehensible, partially correct pronunciation0 for silence, seriously incorrect pronunciation

PHONEPASS TEST

It refers to reading aloud, repeat sentences, say word, and answer the question

It involves:

Part A:

Test takers read aloud selected sentences from among those printed on the test sheet.

Part B:

Test takers repeat sentences dictated over the phone.

Part C:

Test takers answer the question with a single word or a short phrase of two or three words.

For instance:    “Would you get water from a bottle or newspaper?”

Part D:

The test takers hear three word groups in random order and must link them in a correctly ordered sentence.

For instance:    “was writing/ my sister/ a letter”

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: INTENSIVE SPEAKING

Ø  Directed respond task

Ø  Read- aloud task

SENTENCE/ DIALOGUE COMPLETION TASK AND ORAL QUESTIONAIRE

Ø  dialogue completion task

Ø  Directed respond task

Picture cued task

It refers to the use of pictures or sequence of pictures. This method is effective to stimulate speaking respond of the test takers. Administrator provides some picture with some clues, and then the test takers point to the picture to give the answer or teacher point to the picture and then test takers mention the answer orally.

There are some kinds of picture cued task such as:

Ø  Picture cued elicitation of minimal pairs (test administrator points to each picture in series by using question ‘what is this?’)

Ø  Picture cued elicitation of comparatives (use a comparative form to compare some objects in the picture)

Ø  Picture cued elicitation of future tense (using question form of future tense)

Ø   Picture cued elicitation of nouns, negative response, number, and location (the administrator point to the picture and then test takers answer by mentioning what the picture is)

Ø  Picture cued elicitation of response and description (test takers describe what does the picture about.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: RESPONSIVE SPEAKING

Ø  Question and answer.  It refers to short interview.

Ø  Giving instruction and direction. In this case, the administrator poses the problem and then the test takers respond it. The scoring is primarily based on the comprehensibility, and secondarily on another grammatical category.

Ø  Paraphrasing. Test takers read or hear the text or story and the paraphrase it by using their own words.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: INTENSIVE SPEAKING

Ø  Interview. It refers to the oral conversation in which the administrator and the test takers sit down face to face to do question and answer. It is design to get the quick spoken sample from the student in order to verify the placement in to a course.

Ø  Role play. This technique is very popular in communicative language teaching classes. It is like mini drama in which the test takers act out to perform some characters in particular story.

Ø  Discussion and conversation

Ø  Games

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: EXTENSIVE SPEAKING

Ø  Oral presentation. In this case, the test takers are ordered to arrange a particular paper or assignment and then present the materials in front of the class.

Ø  Picture cued story telling. Test takers are given the sequences of the picture story and then create a story based on the pictures.

Ø  Retelling a story, news event. In this case the test takers hear the story and then retell the story orally

Ø  Translation of extended  prose