The document discusses various methods for assessing speaking ability, divided into 5 basic types - imitative, intensive, responsive, interactive, and extensive. It then provides details on designing assessment tasks for each type. For imitative speaking, tasks include repetition and read-alouds. Intensive tasks include directed responses, fill-in-the-blank dialogs, and picture prompts. Responsive tasks involve questions and answers or giving instructions. Interactive tasks include interviews, role-plays, and discussions. Extensive tasks include oral presentations, storytelling, and translations. The document emphasizes matching tasks to objectives and establishing reliable scoring criteria.

1. ASSESSING SPEAKING
ANXHELA XIBRAKU

2. ASSESSING SPEAKING OUTLINE
Assessment of oral language
Basic types of speaking –
1. Imitative
2. Intensive
3. Responsive
4. Interactive
5. Extensive
Micro and Macro of Speaking
Design of Assessment Tasks

3. Designing Assessment Tasks:
Imitative Speaking,
 PhonePass® Test,
Designing Assessment Tasks:
Intensive Speaking,
 Directed Response Tasks,
 Read-Aloud Tasks,
 Sentence!Dialogue Completion Tasks
and Oral Questionnaires,
 Picture-Cued Tasks
 Translation (of Limited Stretches of
Discourse),
Designing Assessment Tasks:
Responsive Speaking,
 Question and Answer,
 Giving Instructions and Directions,
 Paraphrasing,
 Test of Spoken English (TSE®)
Designing Assessment Tasks:
Interactive Speaking,
 Interview,
 Role Play,
 Discussions and
Conversations,
 Games,
 Oral Proficiency Interview
Designing Assessment:
Extensive Speaking,
 Oral Presentations,
 Picture-Cued Story-Telling,
 Retelling a Story, News
Event,
 Translation (of Extended
Prose),

4. ASSESSING SPEAKING
From a pragmatic view of language performance,
listening and speaking are closely interrelated. While it
is possible to isolate some Listening Performance types
it is very difficult to isolate oral production tasks that
do not directly involve interaction of aural comprehension.
Only in limited contexts of speaking
 Monologues
 Speeches
 Telling stories
 Reading aloud
Can we assess oral language
without the aural participation of an interlocutor

5. BASIC TYPES OF SPEAKING
IMITIATIVE performance is the ability to simply
parrot back (imitative) a word or phrase or
even 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.
Focus on pronunciation
not concerned
about comprehension
or expression of meaning

6. BASIC TYPES OF SPEAKING
INTENSIVE Performance is limited, mechanical, or controlled.
It is the production of short stretch of oral language
designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of
grammatical, phrasal, lexical, or phonological relationships.
The speaker must be aware of semantic properties
to be able to respond,
while interaction
with an interlocutor
or test administrator
is minimal at best.

7. BASIC TYPES OF SPEAKING
RESPONSIVE Performance includes interaction and test
comprehension but at a limited level. It involves very
short conversations, standard greetings and small talk,
simple requests as well as comments.

8. BASIC TYPES OF SPEAKING
INTERACTIVE Performance includes interaction and test
comprehension; but the difference between responsive and
interactive speaking is in the length and complexity of the
interaction, which sometimes includes multiple exchanges
or multiple participants
a) Transactional
language and
interpersonal
language;
b) Longer and more
complex Sentences;
c) Specific and
interpersonal
exchanges.

9. BASIC TYPES OF SPEAKING
EXTENSIVE Performance
The extensive oral production tasks include monologues,
speeches, oral presentations, and storytelling, during
which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners
is either highly limited or ruled out altogether.

10. MACRO AND MICRO OF SPEAKING
The macro-skills imply
the speaker’s focus on
the larger elements:
fluency, discourse,
function, style,
cohesion, nonverbal
communication, and
strategic options.
The micro-skills refer to
producing the smaller
chunks of language
such as phonemes,
morphemes, words,
collocations, and
phrasal units.

11. DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS:
IMITATIVE SPEAKING
Word and sentence repetition tasks
Test-takers hear and repeat after the recording
I bought a boat yesterday.
The glow of the candle is growing.
When did they go on vacation?
Do you like coffee?
Test-takers repeat the stimulus.

12. SCORING SCALE FOR REPETITION TASKS
2 acceptable pronunciation
1 comprehensible, partially, correct pronunciation
0 silence, seriously, incorrect pronunciation
The longer the stretch of language, the more possibility
for error and therefore the more difficult it becomes to
assign a point system to the text.

13. PHONEPASS TEST
Test takers read aloud, repeat sentences, say words and
answer questions.
Phonepass 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.

14. DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS
INTENSIVE SPEAKING
Directed Responsive Tasks
The administrator elicits a particular grammatical form or
a transformation of a sentence, but they do require
minimal processing of meaning in order to produce the
correct grammatical output.
Test-takers hear
Tell me he went home.
Tell me that you like rock music.
Tell me that you aren’t interested in tennis

15. INTENSIVE SPEAKING
Read-Aloud tasks
Intensive read-aloud tasks include reading beyond the
sentence level up to paragraph or two.
Teachers listening to the recording would then rate students
on a number of phonological factors (vowels, diphthongs,
consonants,stress, and intonation) by completing a two-
page diagnostic checklist on which all error or questionable
items were noted.
Some variations on the task of simply reading a short
passage:
Reading a scripted dialogue
Reading sentences containing minimal pairs
Reading information from a table or chart

16. INTENSIVE SPEAKING
Sentence/Dialogue Completion Tasks and
Oral Questionnaires
Test-takers are first given time to read through to get its gist
and to think about appropriate lines to fill in then as the
tape, teacher, or test administrator produces one part orally,
the test-takers responds.
The advantages of this technique lies in its moderate control
of the output of the test-takers. On the other hand, this
techniques is its reliance on literacy and an ability to transfer
easily from written to spoken English. In addition, it is
contrived, inauthentic nature of this task.

17. Test-takers see:
o Interviewer : what did you do last weekend?
o Test-taker :
o Interviewer : what did you do after you graduated from
this
program?
o Test-taker :
o Interviewer :
o Test-taker : I was in Japan for two weeks.
o Interviewer :
o Test-taker : it’s ten thirty.
Test-takers respond with an appropriate lines.

18. INTENSIVE SPEAKING
Picture-Cued Tasks
It is more popular ways to elicit oral language performance at
both intensive and extensive levels. Its stimulus requires a
description from the test-takers.
Picture-cued elicitation of minimal pairs
Picture-cued elicitation of comparatives
Picture-cued elicitation of future tense
Picture-cued elicitation of nouns, negative responses,
numbers, and location
Picture-cued elicitation of responses and description
Picture-cued elicitation of giving directions
Picture-cued elicitation of multiple-choice description for
two test takers

20. SCORING SCALE FOR INTENSIVE TASKS
2 Comprehensible; acceptable target form
1 Comprehensible; partially correct target form
0 Silence, or seriously incorrect target form
Evaluating interview could be used:
Grammar
Vocabulary
Comprehensible
Fluency
Pronunciation
Task (accomplishing the objective of the
elicited task)

21. TRANSLATION (OF LIMITED STRETCHES OF
DISCOURSE)
Translation is a meaningful communicative device in
contexts in which the English-user is called on to be
an interpreter.
The test-taker is given a native-language word,
phrase, or sentence and is asked to translate it.

22. DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS:
RESPONSIVE SPEAKING
QUESTION & ANSWER
Question & answer can consist of one or two
questions from an interviewer or they can make up
a portion of a whole battery of questions and
prompts in an oral interview.
The first question is intensive in its purpose; it is a
display question intended to elicit a predetermined
correct response.
Questions at the responsive level tend to be
genuine referential questions in which the test-taker
is given more opportunity to produce meaningful
language in response

23. RESPONSIVE QUESTION MAY TAKE FOLLOWING
FORMS:
Questions eliciting open-ended responses
Test takers hear:
what do you think about the weather today?
why did you choose your academic major?
What kind of strategies have you used to help you
learn English?
Test-takers respond with a few sentences at most

24. GIVING INSTRUCTIONS AND DIRECTIONS
The technique is simple: the administrator poses the
problem, and test taker responds. Scoring is based
primarily on comprehensibility, and secondary on other
specified grammatical or discourse categories. The
choice of topics needs to be familiar enough so that the
test is not general knowledge but linguistic competence.
Finally, the task should require the test-taker to produce
at least five or six sentences.
Eliciting instructions or direction
Test-takers hear:
Describe how to make a typical dish from your country?
How do you access e-mail on a PC?
Test-takers respond with appropriate instruction.

25. PARAPHRASING
The test-takers read or hear a short story or
description with a limited number of sentences
(perhaps two or five) and produce a paraphrase
of the story.
The advantages is they elicit short stretches of
output and perhaps tap into test takers’
to practice the conversational art of
conciseness by reducing the output/ input ratio.

26. TEST- OF SPOKEN ENGLISH (TSE TEST)
The Test of Spoken English are designed to elicit oral
production in various discourse categories rather than
in selected phonological, grammatical, or lexical
targets.
Tasks include description, narration, summary,
giving instruction, comparing and contrasting.
From their findings, the researchers were be able to
report on the validity of the tasks, especially the match
between the intended task functions and the actual
output of both native and non-active speakers.

27. DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS:
INTERACTIVE SPEAKING
Interview
A test administrator and a test-taker sit down in a direct face-to-face
exchange and proceed through a protocol of questions and
directives.
Four level stages:
1. warm-up, preliminary small talk to make test-taker become
comfortable with the situation. No scoring of this phase takes place.
2. level check, a series of preplanned questions.
3. probe, probe questions and prompts challenge test-takers to go to
the heights of their ability, to extend beyond the limits of the
interviewer’s expectation through increasingly difficult questions.
4. Wind-down, a final phase of interview. No scoring for this part.

28. THE SUCCESS OF AN ORAL INTERVIEW WILL
DEPEND ON:
Clearly specifying administrative procedure of the
assessment. (practically)
Focusing the questions and probes on the purpose
(validity)
Appropriately eliciting an optimal amount and quality of
oral
production from the test-taker (biased for best
performance)
Minimizing the possibly harmful effect of the power
relationship between interviewer and interviewee (biased
for best performance)
Creating a consistent, workable scoring system
(reliability)

30. ROLE PLAY
It frees students to be somewhat creative in their
linguistic output. In some versions, role play allows
some rehearsal time so that students can map out
what they are going to say. It also has the effect of
lowering anxieties as students can, even for few
moments, take on the persona of someone other than
themselves.
The test administrator must determine the assessment
objectives of the role play then devise a scoring
technique that appropriately pinpoints those
adjectives.

31. DISCUSSION AND CONVERSATION
Discussion may be especially appropriate tasks through
which elicit and observe such abilities:
Topic nomination, maintenance, and termination
Attention getting, interrupting, control
Clarifying, questioning, paraphrasing
Comprehension signals
Negotiating meaning
Intonation patterns for pragmatic effect
Eye contact, body language
Politeness, and other sociolinguistics factors

32. GAMES
Assessment games:
Tinker toy game
Crossword puzzles
Information gap
City maps
As assessments, the key is to specify a set of criteria
and a reasonably practical and reliable scoring
method.

33. ACTFL ORAL PROFICIENCY INTERVIEW (OPI)
Originally known as the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) test.
In a series of the structured tasks, the OPI is carefully
designed to elicit pronunciation, fluency and integrative
ability, sociolinguistic and cultural knowledge, grammar and
vocabulary.
Valdman (1988) summed up the complaint:
“The OPI forces test-takers into a closed system where,
because the interviewer in endowed with full social control,
they are unable to negotiate a social world….. In short, the
OPI can only inform us how learners can deal with an
artificial social imposition rather than enabling us to predict
how they would be likely to manage authentic linguistic
interactions with target language native
speaker.”

34. DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS
EXTENSIVE SPEAKING
Oral Presentations
The rules for effective assessment must be involved:
Specify the criterion
Set appropriate tasks
Elicit optimal output
Establish practical, reliable scoring process
For oral presentation, a checklist or grid is a common
means of scoring or evaluation.
The wash back effect of a such checklist can be
enhanced by written comments from the teacher, a
conference with the teacher, peer evaluation using
the same form, and self assessment.

36. Picture-Cued Storytelling
It considers a picture or a series of pictures as a
stimulus for a longer story or description.

37. Retelling a Story, News Event
Test-takers hear or read a story or news event that
they are asked to retell.
The objectives in assigning is listening
comprehension of the original to production of a
number of oral discourse features
(sequences and relationship of events, stress and
emphasis pattern), fluency, and interaction with the
hearer.
Scoring should meet the intended criteria.

38. TRANSLATION (OF EXTENDED PROSE)
The longer texts are presented for the test-taker to read in the
native language and then translate into English. Those texts
could come in many forms: dialogue, directions for assembly
product, a synopsis of a story, etc.
The advantage: control the content, vocabulary, and the
grammatical and discourse features.
Disadvantage: the translation of longer texts is highly
specialized skill for which some individuals obtain post-
baccalaureate degrees!
Criteria of scoring should take into account not only the
purpose of stimulating a translation but the possibility of errors
that are unrelated to oral production ability.