Lecture 8

Assessing Speaking

Chapter 7Brown, 2004

Lecture’s Objectives:

By the end of this chapter students will be able to:

- Review types of speaking- Discuss micro and macro skills of speaking- Outline numerous tasks for assessing speaking

***Listening and speaking are almost always closely interrelated. While speaking is a productive skill that can be directly and empirically observed,

those observations are invariably colored by the accuracy and effectiveness of a test-taker’s

listening skill.

Basic types of speaking (p, 141-142)

1. Imitative2. Intensive3. Responsive 4. Interactive5. Extensive

*Define and provide one example on each one of the above mentioned types.

Micro and Macro skills of speaking

** What is the purpose of determining the macro and micro skills of speaking? (p, 142)

Micro skills: refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units.

Macro skills: imply the speakers focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options.

**Read the 16 different objectives to assess in speaking pages:142-143

Three important issues to consider as you set out to design speaking tasks: (p, 143-144)

1. No speaking task s capable of isolating the single skill of oral production.

2. Eliciting the specific criterion you have designated for a task can be tricky because the beyond the word level , spoken language offers a number of productive potions to test-takers.

3. Because of the above two characteristics of oral production assessment, it is important to carefully specify scoring procedures for a response so that you achieve as high reliability as possible.

Designing assessment tasks:

**Imitative Speaking: (p,144-146)- Word repetition tasks- Phone pass tests

**Intensive speaking: (p, 147-159)- Direct response tasks- Read aloud tasks- Sentence/dialogue completion tasks and oral questionnaires- Picture-cued tasks- Translation(of limited stretches of discourse)

***Responsive speaking:(p, 159-166)- Question and answer- Giving instruction and directions- Paraphrasing- Test of spoken English

***Interactive speaking: (p, 167-178)- Interview- Role play- Discussion and conversation- Games- Oral proficiency interview

***Extensive speaking: (p, 179-182)- Oral presentation- Picture-cued story-telling- Retelling a story, news event- Translation( of extended prose)