ASSESSING SPEAKING

One of the productive skills in language is speaking. Speaking and listening are almost always closely interrelated. It is very difficult to isolate oral production tasks that do not directly involve the interaction of aural comprehension. Only in limited contexts of speaking people can assess oral language without the aural participation of an interlocutor. As a productive skill, speaking can be directly and empirically observed. The interaction of speaking and listening challenges the designer of an oral production test to tease apart, as much as possible, the factors accounted for by aural intake. Another challenge is the design of elicitation techniques. Because most speaking is the product of creative construction of linguistic strings, the speaker makes choices of lexicon, structure, and discourse.
In receptive performance, the elicitation stimulus can be structured to anticipate predetermined responses and only those responses. However, in productive performance, the oral or written stimulus must be specific enough to elicit output within an expected range of performance such that scoring or rating procedures apply appropriately. In speaking assessment, each score represents one of several traits such as: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar, comprehensibility, etc.
Speaking has five categories which are similar to listening. First, imitative, it is the ability to simply parrot back (imitate) a word or phrase or possibly a sentence. The only role of listening here is in the short-term storage of a prompt, just long enough to allow the speaker to retain the short stretch of language that must be imitated. Second, intensive, it is the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical, phrasal, lexical, or phonological relationships such as: prosodic elements-intonation, stress, rhythm, juncture. The speaker must be aware of semantic properties in order to be able to respond, but interaction with an interlocutor or test administrator is minimal at best. Third, responsive, it includes interaction and test comprehension but at the somewhat limited level of very short conversations, standard greetings and small talk, simple requests and comments, and the like. Fourth, interactive, sometimes includes multiple exchanges and/or multiple participants. Interaction can take the two forms of transactional language, which has the purpose of exchanging specific information, or interpersonal exchanges, which have the purpose of maintaining social relationships. In interpersonal exchanges, oral production can become pragmatically complex with the need to speak in a casual register and use colloquial language, ellipsis, slang, humor, and other sociolinguistic conventions. The last category, extensive, includes speeches, oral presentations, and story-telling, during which the opportunity foe oral interaction from listeners is either highly limited or ruled out altogether. Language style is frequently more deliberative and formal for extensive tasks, but people cannot rule out certain informal monologues.
A task type that is generally used in imitative speaking is word repetition. In a simple repetition task, test-takers repeat the stimulus, whether it is a pair of words, a sentence, or perhaps a question. Another popular test is PhonePass. It is a widely used and commercially available speaking test in many countries. It is remarkable that research on the PhonePass test has supported the construct validity of its repetition tasks not just for a test-taker’s phonological ability but also for discourse and overall oral production ability. Scores for the PhonePass test are calculated by a computerized scoring template and reported back to the test-taker within minutes. The PhonePass findings could signal an increase in the future use of repetition and read-aloud procedures for the assessment of oral production.
The next type is intensive speaking, in which test-takers are prompted to produce short stretches of discourse through which they demonstrate linguistic ability at a specified level of language. Tasks used in this level like directed response task, the test administrator elicits a particular grammatical form or a transformation of a sentence. The following, read-aloud tasks which include reading beyond the sentence level up to a paragraph or two. Because of the results, reading aloud may actually be a surprisingly strong indicator of overall oral production ability. Reading aloud is somewhat inauthentic in that people seldom read anything aloud to someone else in the real world, with the exception of a parent reading to a child, occasionally sharing a written story with someone, or giving a scripted oral presentation. Another technique for targeting intensive aspects of language requires test-takers to read dialogue in which one speaker’s lines have been omitted. One way which is popular to elicit oral language performance at both intensive and extensive levels is a picture-cued stimulus that requires a description from the test-taker. Pictures may be very simple, designed to elicit a word or a phrase; somewhat more elaborate and “busy”; or composed of a series that tells a story or incident. Scoring responses on picture-cued intensive speaking tasks varies, depending on the expected performance criteria.
Responsive speaking, as the third type, involves brief interactions with an interlocutor, differs from intensive tasks in the increased creativity given to the test-takers and from interactive tasks by the somewhat limited length of utterances. Various tasks in this level are like question and answer consisting of one or two questions from an interviewer or it can make up a portion of a whole battery of questions and prompts in an oral interview, giving instructions and directions, paraphrasing (read or hear a limited number of sentences and produce a paraphrase of the sentence), and Test of Spoken English (TSE). The tasks on the TSE are designed to elicit oral production in various discourse categories rather than in selected phonological, grammatical, or lexical targets.
The fourth category of oral production assessment is interactive speaking. It includes tasks that involve relatively long stretches of interactive discourse (interviews, role plays, discussions, games) and tasks of equally long duration but that involve less interaction (speeches, telling longer stories, and extended explanations and translations). Interviews can vary in length from perhaps five to forty-five minutes depending on their purpose and context, while role playing is a popular pedagogical activity in communicative language-teaching classes. Role play opens some windows of opportunity for test-takers to use discourse that might otherwise be difficult to elicit. The test administrator must determine the assessment objectives of the role play, then devise a scoring technique that appropriately pinpoints those objectives. Discussions, as formal assessment devices, are difficult to specify and even more difficult to score. They offer a level of authenticity and spontaneity that other assessment techniques may not provide. Discussion scoring should be carefully designed to suit the objectives of the observed discussion. Interactive tasks tend to be what some would describe as interpersonal.
The latest one, extensive speaking tasks involve complex, relatively stretches of discourse. They are frequently variations on monologues, usually with minimal verbal interaction. Tasks used in this level are like: oral presentations, picture-cued story-telling, retelling a story and news event, and translation (of extended prose). For oral presentations, a checklist or grid is a common means of scoring or evaluation; while in retelling a story, test-takers hear or read a story that they are asked to retell. In translation, longer texts are presented for the test-taker to read in the native language and then translate into English.
There are many various skills in speaking that can be categorized into two, microskills and macroskills. The former refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units. In the other hand, the latter imply the speaker’s focus on the larger elements like fluency, discourse, function, style cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options. The microskills components are: produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic variants; produce chunks of language of different lengths; produce English stress patterns, word in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonation contours; produce reduced forms of words and phrases; use an adequate number of lexical units to accomplish pragmatic purposes; produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery; monitor one’s own oral production and use various strategic devices; use grammatical word classes, systems, word order, patterns, rules and elliptical forms; produce speech in natural constituents in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breath groups, and sentence constituents; express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms; use cohesive devices in spoken discourse. The other one, macroskills components are: appropriate accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals; use appropriate styles, registers, implicature, redundancies, pragmatic conventions, conversation rules, floor-keeping and yielding, interrupting, and other sociolinguistic features in face-to-face conversations; convey links and connections between events and communicative such relations as focal and peripheral ideas, events and feelings, new information and given information, generalization and exemplification; convey facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language; develop and use battery of speaking strategies.
Three important issues which should be considered by test writer in designing tasks, namely: no speaking task is capable of isolating the single skill of oral production; eliciting the specific criterion people have designated for a task can be tricky because beyond the word level, spoken language offers a number of productive options to test-takers; because of the above two characteristics of oral production assessment, it is important to carefully specify scoring procedures for a response so that ultimately you achieve as high a reliability index as possible.

(Source: H. Douglas Brown, 2004)