Assessing speaking: can it be easier?

Assessing speaking can be difficult! Here Luciana Senna gives her thoughts on how we can make the process easier and offers advice on assessment criteria.

When it comes to assessment, all teachers have mixed emotions. We should admit that we tend to experience a kind of ‘power’ when some of our students are not working hard enough or don’t put more effort to a task, even if you did the best you could in order to make them learn! But other emotions come into play and some questions of doubt go over and over in our minds: Did I provide opportunities for the students to improve themselves? Do they lack anything? Did they understand what I presented? Did I really do my best?

It is true that assessing students can be very hard but there must be a way of making it simpler. Or, at least less ‘painful’ for both teacher and learner. The fear of being unfair to a student is deeply unpleasant and our impressions may be influenced by so many different factors that we can be easily deceived by the scores students achieve on a test.

Reducing subjectivity

Naturally, assessing has a certain amount of subjectivity. However, by identifying the individual aspects of an assessment and by organizing the assessments carefully we can reduce the amount of subjectivity involved.
First of all, we need to identify the following assessment aspects:

1. The reason why I need to test my student
2. What age group I am testing (the student’s profile)
3. What I am testing them on
4. The way I’ll plan the test itself (what will the format be like?)
5. Scoring
6. The impact the assessment will make on the students’ learning process

When we design the assessments we can then keep these aspects in mind and see whether the assessment serves the purpose for which it is designed.

Picking criteria for assessment

We can then start choosing the boundaries within which we believe students can perform and give some feedback on their learning. One thing is essential: let students know your criteria. Below are two ideas to help evaluate your student’s progress.

Pronunciation

If your aim is to check how well your students are pronouncing the words, one activity that may be used is to ask students to read aloud. Of course, if each student reads all the texts aloud you won’t have time to do anything else in the classroom. But you can simply choose 3 or 4 of them to read only one paragraph each and then provide the feedback. It doesn’t necessarily need to have a score if you don’t want to give them marks for such a simple activity, but feedback is essential. It is also a good opportunity to let them know that mispronounced words may hinder communication. To provide this feedback you can use a pattern like the one below so students will be aware of their performance:

Interaction

Now let’s suppose we want to see how well students interact with others. For this activity a good way to assess performance is to offer simulations of real situations and to incorporate role plays. Each student is allocated a character and you can also offer prompts for what they are going to say. Make sure you give them time to rehearse. You can make this activity more sophisticated by bringing along props. The idea is to make students comfortable and to provide them with the necessary support. If you have provided prompts, revised vocabulary and given them time to rehearse, you can expect them to interact in a more natural way.

Some examples for assessment criteria could then be: Will I assess the whole group performance or only individual performances? Did the students use all the prompts, some of them, or none of them? Did they sound natural or not? Was the pronunciation clear? Did they add more to what was offered by the teacher (more vocabulary for example)?

This is just the beginning! The most important thing now is carefully plan the steps for assessment and to consider what we want our students to get out of the experience. This will make assessing speaking an easier and less subjective process.