Speaking skill control

The object of speaking skill control is the degree of monological and dialogical skill formation. The testing of speaking is the most difficult as the teacher will want to check a great number of qualitative parameters:

- the degree of correspondence of students’ speech output to the topic and communicative situation;

- the degree of revealing the topic or situation;

- the level and quality of improvisation while forming utterances;

- the correct use of language means while forming an utterance and expressing one’s idea;

- the variety of language means used;

- the ability to realise communicative functions;

- the degree of logical and linguistic cohesion of students’ speech output.

The quantitative criteria include the volume (the number of words or sentences) and tempo (as well as pausing, repeating, self-interrupting and false starts) of the speech output.

Oral control is difficult to administer as the qualitative criteria prevail over the quantitative ones. Hence, its scoring tends to be highly subjective. It is easy enough to get an impression, and probably a fairly accurate one, from just listening to our students talk, but it is very hard to make an accurate assessment. Teachers of English have all come across fluent speakers who communicate effectively without ever shifting tense or worrying about agreement. We have also come across other students who are so intent on accuracy that their speech is full of hesitation, false starts and self-correction. The problem is how to compare them.

There are two main ways of testing students’ speaking ability: by continuous assessment throughout the year and by giving short oral tests to each student. The former corresponds to the current control. It refers to giving a mark for general willingness and ability to speak in the all the lessons, or else noting down marks for certain oral activities done in class (e.g. role play). This system will of course only be successful if the teacher tells the students that they are being given marks for speaking.

Testing each student individually corresponds to summing-up control. It refers to giving oral tests to every student. But this is very time-consuming and, although the teacher does his best to question as many students as he possibly can, he fails to cover all the individuals on a given topic. As a result, this leading language skill is often not controlled in any way whatsoever. Instead, the teacher tests knowledge of words, structures; the ability to ask and answer questions in written form; the ability to write about the situation or topic suggested.

In order to avoid this, the following testing techniques may be employed. 1) Each student gives his response on tape. The teacher plays back the tape as he has time and evaluates each student’s performance. It has been calculated that it takes a student 1-1.5 minutes to make a response containing 3-4 sentences. The test should be constructed in such a way that the students need not give a lengthy answer but their response must show their ability to pronounce and intone, to use certain vocabulary and grammatical structures and the coherence of the students’ speech output.

2) The teacher gives the whole class a set of general topics to prepare for a few weeks before the test (e.g. talk about your family, talk about a sport you enjoy). Over 2 or 3 lessons (while the class is doing a reading or writing activity, or a test) the teacher calls each student out in turn and quietly tests them on one of the topics. Each test lasts 30-60 seconds. The students do not, of course, know which topic they will be asked to speak about. The teacher can give a mark immediately. To help the teacher do this, he can use a ‘marking grid’, e.g.:

Student
Content
Fluency

Since language teaching is becoming increasingly concerned with communication, its objectives are being reassessed in those terms. Language testing, however, has still by and large failed to develop techniques for measuring effectively the use which is made of language in a communicative situation, preferring procedures which relate to the students’ knowledge of and ability to manipulate the grammatical and phonological systems of a language (Morrow, 1977). To remedy the situation, current tests can be devised to enable learners to manipulate language functions, to identify utterances as belonging to a certain function of language on account of their appropriateness. At the same time, summing-up tests should be testing rather communicative performance than competence. In practice, teachers will have to rely on a battery of control activities and make a point of building up individual profiles for students based on an informal and subjective type of continuous assessment. Teachers must also reject the traditional belief that answers are either right or wrong. The consensus of opinion as far as communicative performance is concerned is that some form of qualitative assessment is more practical than a quantitative one.

The best type of control activity in communicative performance is the one that is essentially a communication task. The student must listen to/ read the instructions, use his language resources to obtain information and communicate this information accurately in order to achieve a successful outcome to the task. In case dialogical skill is being tested, the student will have to enter into a dialogue with a teacher or another student. The latter case is preferable as it allows for simultaneous checking both dialogue participants and decreases anxiety. The interlocutors are to be given a clear communicative task, e.g.:

Partner A	Partner B
You’re going to talk about the town you live in to a friend from a large city. Persuade him that it’s a good place for a week’s holiday. Although you must be truthful about the place, your main concern is to get him to come as a visitor.	You’re thinking of visiting your friend living in a small town at the seaside, but you are not really sure it is worthwhile. Find out as much as you can about the place from your friend. Do not be too easy to persuade.

Finally, the teacher should not forget that testing, especially oral, tends to put students into stress situations. Shy and nervous students are at a real disadvantage. The teacher is to understand that the ability to respond quickly to an unpredictable communicative situation is a matter of psychology and cannot be regarded as a true part of communicative performance.