Kayi (2006) proposed suggestions in teaching speaking that teachers might further consider.

They are the following:

1. Provide a maximum opportunity for students to speak the target language by providing
a rich environment that contains collaborative work, authentic materials and tasks, and
shared knowledge.
2. Try to involve each student in every speaking activity.
3. Reduce teacher speaking time in class while increasing student speaking time. Step back
and observe students.
4. Indicate positive signs when commenting on a student's response.
5. Ask eliciting questions such as "What do you mean? How did you reach that
conclusion?" in order to prompt students to speak more
6. Provide written feedback like "Your presentation was great. It was a good job. I really
appreciated your efforts in preparing the materials and efficient use of your voice...
7. Do not correct students' pronunciation mistakes very often while they are speaking.
Correction should not distract the student from his or her speech
8. Circulate around the classroom to ensure that students are on the right track and see
whether they need your help while they work in groups or pairs.
9. Provide the vocabulary beforehand that students need in speaking activities.
10. Diagnose problems faced by students who have difficulty in expressing themselves in
the target language and provide more opportunities to practice the spoken language.

Speaking tasks

For many years and even until now, English language teachers have continued to teach
speaking through repetitive drills or memorization of dialogues. However, the goal of teaching
speaking is to make students express themselves correctly and effectively to be understood. To
teach speaking communicatively is to provide varied speaking tasks that enable students to
communicate in real-life scenarios. The main aim of speaking tasks is to help students develop
fluency. To develop students' speaking skills, they need intensive practice. Below are suggested
activities that facilitate speaking practice.

Below are some examples of speaking tasks that teachers can employ in their classes.

1. Discussion

A discussion is carried out to arrive at a conclusion, to share ideas about an

event, or to find solutions. The teacher needs to orient the students on the purpose of
the discussion so time will not be wasted on talking about other things.

Example of discussion points:

 a) Students at all levels of the educational ladder in the Philippines are still staying
at home due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Is it already safe for students to go back
to face-to-face classes? Why? Why not?
b) Mental Wellness amidst the pandemic: Myth or Reality
c) Learners in the 21st century and beyond
2. Your last word is mine

The first student starts telling a story; another continues using the last word
uttered by the first student, then another student continues until the whole story is
finished.

3. Short Speeches

Given a time frame, students are given a topic and deliver a speech before the
class.

4. Guess the picture

One student has the picture and the partner needs to guess what's in the picture
by asking probing questions and clarifications.

5. Role Play

In role play, students pretend they are in various social contexts and have a
variety of social roles. This exercise will encourage the students to speak in real-life
situations.

6. Interviews

Students interview an interesting personality in the community and report to the

class the results of the interview.

7. Narrating or telling a friend about an amusing weekend experience

8. Playing games that engage students in conversation
9. Conducting class debates
 LESSON 3: Assessing Speaking

Assessing the speaking skills of students can be very challenging for teachers of English.
It is because when a person speaks, it involves doing various skills at the same time like using
appropriate vocabulary, correct grammar, pronunciation, and other non-verbal communication
skills. Porto (1997) and Omar (2001) indicated that developing oral skills is a real challenge for
many teachers of English as a second language since the students do not live in an English-
speaking environment. Success in speaking is being able to communicate the message
effectively using accurate and acceptable use of the language. Thus, multiple-choice type of
assessment, or fill-in-the-blank worksheet, or true or false type of test and other typical types
of assessment cannot authentically measure the speaking skills of the students.

What then should we look for when assessing students' speaking ability?

Pronunciation, vocabulary, accuracy, interaction, and fluency are important components

of students' overall speaking competencies. Using different assessment techniques is the best
way for educators to get a clear picture of each student's speaking abilities.

Assessing speaking skills entails teachers to pay attention to the following:

1. Fluency

Fluency means speaking easily, reasonably quickly without having to stop and
pause a lot. It refers to how many languages a student can speak, as opposed to
accuracy which focuses on whether that language is correct or not. A lot of conversation
classes, especially more informal conversation classes, focus solely on fluency.

Fluency is frequently defined in terms of speed of spoken delivery as, for

example, the capacity to produce speech at a normal rate and without interruption
(Skehan, 2009, p. 510). As a teacher, it is important to assess your students' fluency,
whether your only goal is that your students can communicate in English, or whether
fluency is one of the many goals in your conversation class. In the same way that some
students have trouble reading out loud, some students also have trouble with fluency.
These students may speak unnaturally slowly and pause frequently while speaking to
search for words.

2. Pronunciation

Pronunciation is the act of producing the sounds of speech, including

articulation, stress, and intonation. Pronunciation is important in speaking. However,
when it comes to speaking assessments, the utmost consideration is whether the
learner's pronunciation makes communication easy or difficult.
 For pronunciation assessment, teachers must therefore consider more than just
how the words and letters sound. Other considerations are the changes in the tone of
voice, pronouncing words with greater emphasis than the other), and how words can
sound different when they are joined together in natural speech. What the teacher can
focus on during assessment is making sure that listeners can fully understand what the
speaker is communicating observing correct pronunciation, proper intonation, stress,
and connected speech. The teacher may require students to record while reading a
passage or paragraph or short story. This provides teachers the opportunity to listen to
the student's pronunciation and provide feedback and identify areas for improvement.
The teacher may also initiate conversations with students to assess their pronunciation
skills.

3. Vocabulary

This refers to the body of words used in a particular language. Vocabulary is

usually assessed through vocabulary tests, using multiple choice or fill-in-the-blanks.
However, in the context of speaking, it is the consideration of the breadth and depth of
the vocabulary used by the speaker. Breadth refers to the number of words a student
knows. Depth is what the learner knows about the words.

4. Accuracy

This refers to the correct use of the language system. Language teachers expand
grammatical constructs by going beyond the assessment of grammatical form and
meaning to grammatical use.

5. Interaction

This refers to the ability to interact with others during communicative tasks.

Types of Speaking Assessment Tasks

Brown (2004:141) provides five types of tasks that teachers can use to assess the
speaking ability of students.

1. Imitative

This involves repeating a small stretch of language and focusing on

pronunciation. Test maker considers using this type of assessment if he is not
interested in the test taker's competence in understanding. The competence
assessed is that of purely phonetic, prosodic, lexical, and grammatical
(pronunciation).

2. Intensive
1.1. Reading aloud
 Brown (2004) suggests that reading aloud can be used as a companion for other
more communicative tasks.
1.2. DRT is beneficial to elicit a specific grammatical form or a transformation of a
sentence which requires minimal processing like producing English stress
patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and
intonational contours; produce reduced forms of words and phrases and using
an adequate number of lexical units (words), grammatical word classes (nouns,
verbs, etc.), systems (e.g.. tense, agreement, pluralization), word order,
patterns, rules, forms. (Brown, 2004)
1.3. Sentence/Dialogue Completion
This type will probably be beneficial only for assessing the test taker's
micro skill of providing the right chunks of language and other pronunciation
feature
3. Responsive

These are speaking tasks that involve responses to spoken prompts. Some of
these examples are question and answer, giving instructions and directions, and
paraphrasing

4. Interactive

This refers to interactional and transactional conversations. Some examples are:

a. Interview

In conducting an interview, the teacher must create a relaxed atmosphere,

must talk less, and listen more so he/she can collect more information about the
students, and the topics must be within the interest and knowledge of the
students. Constructive feedback should be given after the interview to focus on
the good features of the interview and the things to improve.

b. Drama-like Task

O'Malley (1996:85) divides the drama-like task into three sub- types:
improvisations, role play, and simulation. The difference of each is respectively
the preparation and scripting. Improvisation gives very little opportunity for
students to prepare for the situation and may incite creativity in using the
language. Role play provides a slightly longer time for students to prepare,
although scripting is highly unlikely. Meanwhile, simulation (including debate)
requires planning and decision-making. Simulation may involve real-world
sociodrama which is the pinnacle of speaking competence.

c. Discussions and Conversations

 Discussions and conversations (Brown, 2004: 175) are informal
assessments to performance in 1) starting, maintaining, and ending a topic; 2)
getting attention, interrupting, and controlling: 3) clarifying. questioning and
paraphrasing; 4) signaling for comprehension (e.g nodding); 5) using appropriate
intonation patterns; 6) using kinesics, eye contact and body language; 7) being
polite, being formal and other sociolinguistic situation

d. Games

Games that can elicit spoken language objectively can be used as an informal
assessment for speaking

5. Extensive (monologue)
a. Speech (Oral Presentation or oral report)

It is commonly practiced to present a report, paper, or design in a school setting.

An oral presentation can be used to assess the speaking skill holistically or analytically.

b. Picture-cued Story Telling

Similar to the limited version, at this level, the main consideration of using a
picture or series of pictures is to make it into a stimulus for a longer story or description.

c. Retelling a Story or New Event

The focus is usually on the meaningfulness of the relationship of events within

the story, fluency, and interaction with the audience (Brown, 2004)

Assessing Speaking Using Rubrics

In speaking assessment, the teacher needs to integrate all the parameters that
constitute effective speaking. The use of rubrics is very helpful in assessing speaking. Rubrics
help improve student performance since students are aware of what areas they can improve
on.

There are two types of rubrics that can be used in assessing speaking: (1) holistic and (2)
analytical.

The holistic rubric leads the rater to evaluate or score the overall components of
communicative competence without separately considering another component of language
production. Nitko (2001) further said that a holistic rubric is more appropriate when the task
requires students to create various responses. Principally, the holistic rating rubric reports the
overall quality, proficiency, and understanding of the content while speaking.

Another type is an analytic rubric. This rubric requires the rater to evaluate or score the
components of language production separately (Moskal, 2000; Nitko, 2001). It scores
performance in different subcategories such as grammar, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency,
pronunciation, and task completion.

O'Malley (1996:65) suggests several steps in developing rubric: (1) Set criteria of task
success; (2) Set dimensions of language to be assessed (grammar, vocabulary, fluency,
pronunciation. etc); (3) Give appropriate weight to each dimension (if the omission is possible,
do); (4) Focus on what test taker can do, instead of what they cannot.