Designing assessment tasks: Responsive Speaking

Question and answer

Consists of one or two brief interactions with a interviewer.

They can vary from easy to complex questions.

There are display and referential questions.

Remember to know exactly what you are eliciting from your students.

Eliciting open-ended responses:

Example: What do you think of the weather?

Eliciting questions from the speaker:

Do you have any questions for me?

Giving instructions and directions

Be very clear.

Be direct.

The instructor poses the problem, the student responds.

Eliciting instructions or directions:

Example: describe how to make a typical dish from your country?

Students must respond accordingly.

Paraphrasing

The test taker must hear a couple of sentences and then they must try to reconstruct what they have heard in their own words.

Paraphrasing a story:

For example: paraphrase the following story in your own words.

Students must respond with a few sentences.

There are other examples, such as paraphrasing a phone call, etc.

Test of Spoken English

 

This is a 20 minute video-taped exam.

The steps for the test are:

•       Describe something physical.
•       Narrate from presented material.
•       Summarize information.
•       Give directions based on visual materials.
•       Give instructions.
•       Give an opinion.
•       Support an opinion.
•       Compare/contrast.
•       Hypothesize.
•    Function ‘interactively’.
•    Define.

Researchers can find the relation between the validity of tasks, task functions and actual output of native and non-native speakers.

 Interview

It is the interaction between test-taker and interviewer. It can be video-taped for later re-listening. The interviewer grades the student by focusing on several parameters. It may take an hour.

The steps to follow are:

Warm-up:

Small talk.

Level Check:

Answers wh questions.

Produces a narrative without interruptions.

Reads a passage loud.

Tells how to make something or do something.

Engages in a brief, controlled, guided role play.

Probe:

Responds to interviewer’s questions about something the test-taker doesn’t know and is planning to include in an article.

Talks about their own field study or career.

Engages in a longer, more open-ended role-play.

Wind down:

Feelings about the interview.

Information on results.

Further information.

The success of an oral interview will depend on:

• Practicality
• Validity
• Biased for the best performance
• Reliability

Open-ended tasks can involve some judgments that are susceptible to some unreliability.

Criteria are important to evaluate those types of judgments.

ROLE PLAY

Role playing is a popular pedagogical activity in communicative language-teaching classes.

It allows being creative and approaching real-world pragmatics.

DISCUSSIONS AND CONVERSATIONS

They can be difficult to specify and even more to score. But as informal techniques to assess learners, they can offer a level of authenticity and spontaneity.

Assessing the performance of participants should be carefully designed to suit the objectives.

GAMES

Among informal assessment devices are a variety of games that directly involve language production. For instance:

• Tinkertoy
• Crossword puzzles
• Information gap grids
• City maps

Those tasks may go beyond traditional assessments. The benefit of such an informal assessment may not be as much in a summative evaluation as in its formative nature, with washback for the students.

ORAL PROFICIENCY INTERVIEW

The OPI is carefully designed to elicit pronunciation, fluency and integrate ability sociolinguistic and cultural knowledge, grammar, and vocabulary. Performance can be judged by the examiner to be at one of ten possible levels on the ACTLF designated proficiency guidelines for speaking: Superior, Advanced, Intermediate, Novice and their branches.