Oral Testing in the High School Classroom

Speaking continues to be the most neglected area in testing. Although most students in surveys claim that they want to speak the foreign language, and many teachers stress speaking, very infrequently do we actually test the skill. One reason is that speaking tests can be very time consuming. This is certainly true for tests designed along the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Even speaking tests employing situation cards can be fairly time consuming since one situation consisting of 5-6 exchanges may not supply teachers with enough information to determine a grade. Hence, each student will have to be presented with several situation cards in a testing situation. In the following discussion, reference is made to speaking tests of communication, not pronunciation tests, intonation tests, vocabulary tests via speaking, or grammar tests via speaking, consisting of transformation items where a student is given a model and must change it in some way (present to past; noun to pronoun; statement to question, etc.). In addition to the situation card format, an alternative is a test of 10 different questions, each related to material covered in class, given in a personal interview format. Such a test is easy to construct and can be administered in a few minutes. For example, questions can be constructed to be similar to (or even identical to) the kinds of questions found and manipulated in Chapters 1, 2 and 3, or unit 7, or chapters 11 and 12, of the text you are using. The teacher needs to have several questions of comparable difficulty for each item. Hence, a test item bank is very valuable. Although Valette indicates that formal speaking tests need not be given often: once a semester will suffice in high school and college classes (Valette, 121). It is very important that students have the opportunity to experience several oral exams during the semester or the year, since speaking is a skill that needs constant reinforcement and recycling. It is often too traumatic for a student to experience only one oral exam at the end of a semester. It is also unfair to the student to assign a grade for speaking ability based on this one

Mathematics education · Pedagogy · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Psychology