Another challenge is to elicit a criterion because beyond the word level, a student has many options when producing spoken language. That is to say, that when designing a task we must try to be as specific with the micro- or macro-skills we are setting for the activity as we can, so you will be sure which aim you want your students to achieve. All of this bearing in mind that no speaking task is able to separate the only skill of oral production, since most of them involve the interaction of aural comprehension. Now, in order to conclude this post, I want to share with my colleagues these useful webpages I've found where you can design rubrics, which I consider as a great tool when being objective is the principal aim. Rubrics, are more than a check list and they provide corrective feedback. Take your time to explore and try them.
Hope you find this post useful for your teacing process.
I totally agree with you. As we should avoid subjectivity on assessing speaking we must have a wide rank of speaking traits or a grid of elements that should be held in the process of learning. This way, we will be able to assess and give feedback in each section so that students can improve genuinely, taking into account micro and macro skills throughout all of the activities performed. One more comment to add here is that speaking activities must be authentic and they should come from aural activities. We listen and then we speak..
ResponderBorrarI agree with that reality that assessing speaking is so difficult for teachers and we have to find a balance or better a way to grade conscientiously the student´s performance. However, I think beyond assessing pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar, comprehensibility, etc, we had to think about the content because language ultimately is to communicate and those tools that I mentioned are vehicles of a message or idea what is important too; however, convey meaning should be more important than being orthodox with the usage of rules. Thus,teachers must be aware of not being so critical with the student´s usage of those tools but also noticing the student´s effectiveness at the moment of transmitting their thoughts.
ResponderBorrarSpeaking so far seems challenging for both students and teachers, in the case of teacher the matter goes on how to measure the knowlegde, in this cases for us as language teacher's, of English he has gain through wat his saying, we will have to be very careful on seekeing what's we are assessing and testing in order to give the most fare "grade" to the student, measuring all the posible elements present in a skill like is Speaking
ResponderBorrarRocio, I think that speaking (and also listening)are difficult skills to master, specially for non-native speakers because of the differences between written and spoken language. As a English teacher we should aim to help students to become effective communicators by asking them to practice English not only for the proposed activites but also for colloquial use in the classroom among them.
ResponderBorrarAlso the implementation of meaningful tasks Instead of activities that involve drilling and memorization of sentences and grammatical patterns. To improve and to assess Speaking activities that required learners to negotiate meaning should be taken into account. Feedback is important in this process as well of the stimulation of listening as speaking and listening are closely related.
Hugs :)