A.

Placement Test Before Starting a Speaking Course

A placement test should applied before starting any language course in which speaking is a
priority. The test must aim to determine how well the learners are doing in this speaking skills.
You could use some of these forms of assessment to obtain those results:

1. A short and informal chat

2. A description of an image
3. A series of questions about an specific topic.

B. Challenges When Testing Speaking

Learning how to teach and test speaking skills is probably one of the biggest challenges
compared to the other three language skills because you have to pay attention to aspects such
as:

1. Fluency: This means speaking easily, reasonably quickly and without having to stop and
pause a lot.
2. Pronunciation: The act or result of producing the sounds of speech, including
articulation, stress, and intonation.
3. Vocabulary: The body of words used in a particular language.
4. Accuracy: This refers to how correct learners’ use of the language system is, including
their use of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary.
5. Interaction: This refers to the ability to interact with others during communicative
tasks.
6. Communication: This refers to the students’ ability to transmit her/his ideas.

C. 5 Type of Activities to Test Speaking Skills

Now that you know the aspects that you have to pay attention to, it is time to cover some of
the different types of speaking activities that you can use to evaluate speaking skills.

There are five types of activities to assess speaking skills:

 1. Intensive Speaking
2. Responsive Speaking
3. Interactive Speaking
4. Extensive Speaking
5. Imitative Speaking

Now we are going to explore a little bit about each one of them

1. Intensive Speaking

a. A read aloud Task: Teacher listen to a recording and evaluate the students in a series of
phonological factors and fluency.

Some variations of this task are:

 reading a scripted dialogue with someone else

 reading sentences containing minimal pairs
 reading information from a table chart

b. Sentence/ dialogue completion task: Students read through the dialogue so he can think
about proper lines to fill in. The teacher produces one part orally and the students responds

c. Picture cued Tasks: The picture-cued requires a description from the test taker

2. Responsive Speaking

These are some of the task which can be used when using Responsive Speaking Tasks

a. Question and answer: Students respond questions that the test administrator asks

b. Giving Instructions and Directions: The test-taker is asked to give directions or instructions

c. Paraphrasing: The test-taker is asked to paraphrase in two or three sentences what he heard
or read.

3. Interactive Speaking
These are some of the most common interactive speaking tasks

a. Interview: It is a face-to-face exchange between test administrator and test taker. The stages
of an interview are warm-up, level Check, probe and wind-down

Role play is a common pedagogical activities used in communicative English classes

b. Discussions and Conversations: These two speaking tasks provide a level of authenticity and
spontaneity that other assessment techniques may not provide

Games are an informal assessment task but they are not commonly used.

4. Extensive Speaking

These are some of the most common extensive speaking tasks that you can use to assess
speaking.

Oral Presentations are the most common task for evaluating extensive speaking, these are
evaluated based on content and delivery.

a. Picture-cued story telling: Students describe a story based on series of pictures that they
previously saw.

b. Re-Telling a story, News Event: Students are asked to tell a story of a new of something they
heard or read.

5. Imitative speaking

Imitative speaking tasks are based on repetition. You just need to repeat a sentence you hear.

Examples include directed response tasks, reading aloud, sentence and dialogue completion,
limited picture-cued tasks.

D. SCORING PROCEDURES

On a speaking test, getting the student to say something appropriate is only half the job.
Scoring the test is egually challenging. In fact, the complex task of scoring a written composition
is the only thing that matches the challenge of scoring a speaking test. Yet there are ways to
simplify the scoring. The most successful way is a system of discrete objectified scores for
nearly every utterance or response that the student makes. The alternative is to use holistic
grading that evaluates the entire body of student speech simultaneously.

1. Holistic Scoring

To understand how the several components of student speech can be evaluated holistically, we
will look at examples of holistic scoring procedures used in two commercial speaking tcsts.
Speaking on the ALIGU Test (see Appendix) has been based for nearly two decades on five
criteria: (1) comprehension, (2) pronunciation, (3) grammar and word order, (4) vocabulary, and
(S) general speed of speech and sentence length. Each of these is weighted egually. The criteria
for grammar and word order follow:

5 points: Uses English with few (if any) noticeable errors of grammar or word order.

4 points: In general uses “good English,” but with occasional grammatical or word-order errors
which do not, however, obscure meaning (e.g., “I am needing more English”). |

3 points: Meaning occasionally obscured by grammatical and/or word-order errors.

2 points: Grammatical usage and word order definitely unsatisfactory: freguently needs to
Tephrase constructions and/or restricts himself to basic structural patterns (e.g., uses the
simple present tense where he should use past or future).

1 point: Errors of grammar and word order make comprehension guite difficult.

0 points: Speech so full of grammatical and word order errors as to be virtually unintelligible to
“the man in the street.”

2. Objectified scoring

Objectified scoring is a perfectly satisfactory way to evaluate speaking tests. But for those
interested in learning to score oral tests holistically, the modified system of objectified scoring
can be used as a bridge to holistic grading. Initially, all items of an interview can be handied on
a 2-1-9 basis. Content guestions can later be graded on a 4-3-2 1-0 scale. Later still, guided
items or Entire speaking tests can be done holistically using a five-point scale. Most ESL
teachers, however, can manage guite nicely with the simpler objectified scale.

By utilizing objectified scoring procedures, you can add tests of speaking to the array of
communicative and language skill €xams that you gre able to prepare, administer, and score.
Should the occasion arise that a commercial examination is reguired, you can consult the
Appendix for the test most appropriate for your specific needs.