Assessing speaking

How to assess SpeakingManuel Illescas and Eli Jiménez

Listening Comp.

Vocabulary

Flu

ency

Gram

mar

What should we assess?

Pronunciation

The Alphabet Soup of Assessment

1. Lower teacher participation

2. Create a List of Objectives

3. Include Different Types of Speaking Tasks

4. Design an Evaluation Rubric

5. Give Feedback

The first thing you’ll have to consider when designing effective speaking tests is that you’ll have to speak less. A lot less. 

These objectives are not things like “learning the simple past but more practical, context-based goals like “learning to talk about what you did in the recent past”.

Once you have defined the topics you want to test them on, define the types of speaking tasks they’ll need to complete. 

How do you grade your students across these various tasks? Prepare an evaluation rubric. First you have to decide exactly what you’ll evaluate.

Finally, just as essential as the test itself, and more important than the grade/score, is the feedback you’ll give your students on how they performed. 

• The purpose of assessingstudents is:

To determine whether or not the

objectives have been reached or

not.

http://iteslj.org/questions/

Common Speaking Tasks in Language Classrooms

Classroom participation

Class presentations/debates

Weekly digital voice journals with audio/video prompts by email

Time to test and be tested:

1. Choose a topic2. You have 4 minutes to prepare your

assignment.3. Present the procedure and the result of

your topic.4. While your partners are presenting,

please grade your partners’ presentation using the rubric that your teacher gave you. Be objective and write some comments.

Assessment time!