Assessment Language

Formats, tasks and settings

In an assessment, there are lots of ways in which we can try to reproduce the conditions of real life speaking. This video introduces some possibilities. Which formats, tasks and settings do you have experience of?

Formats
Common formats for speaking tests include:

• Interview: This has the advantage of being interactive, but is not like a real conversation because one person usually asks all the questions and the other answers them.
• Oral presentation: Presentations can be useful in business or academic situations, but they are not very interactive.
• Interactive task: When two or more students work together, it encourages natural student interaction and genuine communication. However, one student’s performance might affect the other’s.
• Group discussion: This can work well with large classes because it saves time by assessing students together. However, teachers need to be careful not to allow any students to dominate while others say very little.

Tasks

Speaking tasks commonly used in assessment include:

• Describing something: For example, describing a picture. This gives students something to talk about, and it doesn’t require students to read anything.
• Comparing things: This is similar to describing something, but can be more demanding. It encourages students to compare and contrast two different things.
• Telling a story: This is a very natural speaking activity. Stories can be based on pictures. Alternatively, students can tell their own stories, but some students might find it difficult to think of a story to tell.
• Giving some personal information: This is also a natural speaking activity, and focuses on personal topics that students are familiar with. As well as basic information, it can include talking about personal experiences and opinions.

Settings

Technology has made a variety of different settings possible for speaking tests:

• Live: This doesn’t require any technology, but it means that the assessment has to be completed in real-time.
• Recorded: This allows lots of students’ speaking performances to be recorded at the same time, and it also means that markers can listen more than once. However, it means that markers need time to listen to the recordings after the test.
• Face-to-face: This might be considered more realistic, but it means that the marker and the students need to be in the same place for the test.
• Remote (via phone or internet): This may feel different from face-to-face communication, but it can make tests easier to access, especially for students in remote locations.

Different types of rating scale, holistic and analytic.

Holistic (sometimes called global) rating scales give one overall score for a piece of writing or speaking. Holistic scales are often easier for teachers to use, and can produce more consistent marking.

Analytic rating scales give separate scores for different aspects of writing or speaking, such as task achievement, vocabulary, and grammar, for example. Analytic rating scales can be useful for formative assessment, because they give learners more detailed information about the strengths and weaknesses of their writing.

In short:

To make sure your students ‘know a word’ you might want to check some or all of the following:

• meaning and use: this can depend on context (the same word can be used and have different meanings in different contexts) and on level (our students will learn additional meanings and uses as they progress)
• word families: suffixes and prefixes that can be used to change meaning (e.g. use - misuse) or word class (e.g. use - usual)
• spelling: how to spell (allowing for differences between British and North American English) and how to write the word (e.g. are capitals necessary?)
• pronunciation: receptive and productive, including word stress (again allowing for differences between British and North American English)
• collocations and grammar patterns: which words can come before and after it and how fixed they are.

Knowing is more than simply recognising. Students have to put their grammar into practice when speaking or writing.