This document discusses how to assess students' speaking skills. It recommends designing speaking tests with lower teacher participation, creating a list of objectives, including different speaking tasks, designing an evaluation rubric, and providing feedback. Some common speaking tasks are classroom participation, presentations, and weekly voice journals. An example assessment asks students to choose a topic, prepare for 4 minutes, present on the procedure and results, and grade their peers using a rubric. The overall purpose is to determine if learning objectives have been achieved.

1. How to assess Speaking
Manuel Illescas
and Eli Jiménez

3. What should
we assess?

5. 1. Lower teacher participation
2. Create a List of Objectives
3. Include Different Types of Speaking Tasks
4. Design an Evaluation Rubric
5. Give Feedback
The first thing you’ll have to consider when designing effective speaking tests is that you’ll have to speak less. A lot less.
These objectives are not things like “learning the simple past but more practical, context-based goals like “learning to talk about what
you did in the recent past”.
Once you have defined the topics you want to test them on, define the types of speaking tasks they’ll need to complete.
How do you grade your students across these various tasks? Prepare an evaluation rubric.
First you have to decide exactly what you’ll evaluate.
Finally, just as essential as the test itself, and more important than the grade/score, is the feedback you’ll give your students on how they
performed.

6. • The purpose of assessing
students is:
To determine whether or not the
objectives have been reached or
not.

9. http://iteslj.org/questions/
Common Speaking Tasks in
Language Classrooms
Classroom participation
Class presentations/debates
Weekly digital voice journals with
audio/video prompts by email

10. Time to test and be
tested:

11. 1. Choose a topic
2. You have 4 minutes to prepare your
assignment.
3. Present the procedure and the result of
your topic.
4. While your partners are presenting,
please grade your partners’
presentation using the rubric that your
teacher gave you. Be objective and
write some comments.
Assessment time!