What should be assessed
The question that should always be asked first is, does the assessment fit the course, does it link up with the learning outcomes? I remind tutors of the definitions of 'short turns' and 'longer transactional turns' given in 6.2.3.3. If students have only been given the opportunity to interject with short turns into a conversation over the course of the academic year, it is unfair to require them to submit to a test involving a 10-minute presentation:
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The ability to produce long transactional turns, in which clear information is transferred, is, we claim, not an ability which is automatically acquired by all native speakers of a language. It is an ability which appears to need adequate models, adequate practice and feedback. […] Simply training the student to produce short turns will not automatically yield a student who can perform satisfactorily in long turns. |
Having chosen the type of assessment, the next question you should ask is what the criteria of assessment will be. When I was first involved in marking oral exams, I was required to interview a candidate for, maybe, 10-15 minutes and award a single percentage mark at the end. I found this phenomenally difficult to do, but put it down to inexperience. It was only when I was invited to mark for an A level examining board that I discovered the value of assessment criteria covering several categories, for the purposes of reducing subjectivity. Such criteria also go a long way towards ensuring parity across a number of students and across several examiners (see 6.6.5), although any criterion is understandably open to a certain amount of interpretation.
Depending on the exercise, assessment categories will vary. For a presentation exercise, there may be:
- a content mark (knowledge of the subject - evidence of research displayed, quantity, selection and use of knowledge, illustrations and examples employed);
- possibly a separate category for the way in which a candidate justifies an opinion (development of ideas - how relevant, depth of ideas, developed range of opinions).
Language marks may fall into the following categories:
- pronunciation and intonation (whether comprehensible, anglicized, poor on common sounds or only difficult ones);
- fluency / communicative competence (relationship with interlocutor, fluency throughout or only confined to pre-learned material, reliance on notes, general communication skills);
- accuracy (general grammatical awareness, mastery of basic / higher level grammar, major or minor errors);
- structures / vocabulary (simple or complex sentence structure, frequent repetition or good variety, idiomatic language).
Each of the categories will need to be weighted according to its perceived importance. Once this is decided, mark sheets like the ones found in Appendix 4 can be created and photocopied for each candidate. The criteria should be made explicitly available to students.
| Choose one of the sample marking sheets in Appendix 4 that is most appropriate to a forthcoming piece of oral work you have to mark, and test it out. Evaluate its potential as a marking scheme for your classes. |
For comparison, the marking criteria used by the Institute of Linguists in their Certificates of Oral Proficiency at Intermediate and Diploma levels are given in Appendix 3.
It may also be of interest to consider the criteria used to assess qualitative aspects of spoken language in the Common European Framework, ie:
- range;
- accuracy;
- fluency;
- interaction;
- coherence.
Click here for table of criteria (CEF, 2002, section 3.4).
These criteria contribute to a final mark pegged against one of the six Common Reference Levels of attainment:
- A1 breakthrough;
- A2 waystage;
- B1 threshold;
- B2 vantage;
- C1 effective operational efficiency;
- C2 mastery.
