Assessing Speaking
 
Listening and speaking are interrelated – difficult to isolate oral production tasks.

Challenges:
• How do you know that a speaking score is exclusively a measure of oral performance?
• Elicitation : your goal x stimuli
• Open- ended tasks: how do we score?
One possible solution – assign several scores

Basic types of speaking:

Imitative
Intensive
Responsive
Interactive
Extensive
Micro and macro skills of speaking

Criteria for assessment

Micro- skills: phonemes, words, collocations, phrasal units
They include production English stress patterns, reduced forms, production of fluent speech, use of strategic devices (pauses, fillers).

Macro- skills: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication.
They include the appropriate accomplishment of communicative functions, use of appropriate styles, registers, conversation rules, etc.

Points to consider when designing tasks:
Isolation (?)
Elicitation
Score
Imitative speaking

Phonological focus – repetion of isolated words
Word level to sentence level

Example:

Test takers hear:

Repeat after me:
Beat [pause] bit [pause]
Bat [pause] vat [pause]

I bought a boat yesterday.
Score:
   
2 – acceptable pronunciation
1- comprehensible, partially correct pronunciation
0- silence, seriously incorrect pronunciation
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