ASSESSING SPEAKING

From a pragmatic view of language performance, listening, and speaking are almost always closely interrelated. While it is possible to isolate some listening performance types (see Chapter 6), 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 (monologues, speeches, or telling stories and reading aloud) can we assess oral language without the aural participation of an interlocutor.

While speaking is a productive skill that can be directly and empirically observed, those observations are invariably colored by the accuracy and effectiveness of a test taker's listening skill, which necessarily compromises the reliability and validity of an oral production test. How do you know for certain that speaking score is exclusively a measure of oral production without the potentially frequent clarifications of an interlocutor? This 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 linguistics strings, the speaker makes choices of lexicon, structure, and discourse. If your goal is to have test-takers demonstrate certain spoken grammatical categories, for example, the stimulus you design must elicit those grammatical categories in ways that prohibit the test-taker from avoiding or paraphrasing and thereby dodging production of the target form.

As tasks become more and more open ended, the freedom of choice given to test-takers creates a challenge in scoring procedures. In receptive performance, the elicitation stimulus can be structured to anticipate predetermined response and only those responses. In productive performance, the oral and written stimulus must be specific enough to elicit output within an expected range of performance such that scoring or rating procedures apply appropriately. For example, in a picture-series task, the objective of which is to elicit a story in a sequence of events, test-takers could opt for a variety of plausible ways to tell the story, all of which might be equally accurate. How can such disparate responses be evaluated? One solution is o assign not one but several scores for each response each score representing one of several traits (pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar, comprehensibility, etc).

All of these issues will be addressed in this chapter as we review types of spoken language and micro- and macroskills of speaking, then outline numerous tasks for assessing speaking

(a) Basis Types Of Speaking

We cited four categories of listening performance assessment tasks. A similar taxonomy emerges for oral production.

1. Imitative.  At one end of continuum of type of speaking performance is the ability to simply parrot back (imitate) a word or phrase or possibly a sentence. While this is a purely phonetic level of oral production, a number of prosodic, lexical, and grammatical properties of language may be included in the criterion performance. We are -interested only in what is traditionally labeled "pronunciation"; no inferences are made about the test-taker's ability to understand or convey meaning or to participate in an interactive conversation. The only role of listening her is in the short stretch of language that must be imitated.

2. Intensive. A second type of speaking frequently employed in assessment contexts 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. Examples of intensive assessment task include directed responses tasks including simple sequences; translation up to simple sentence level.

3. Responsive. Responsive assessment tasks include 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. The stimulus is almost always spoken prompt (in order to preserve authenticity), with perhaps is only one or two follow-up questions or retorts:

A. Mary:  Excuse me, do you have the time?

Dough: Yeah Nine-fifteen.

B. Tim:  What is the most urgent environmental

Problem today?

Sheila:  I would say massive deforestation.

C. Jeff:  Hey, Stef, how's it going?

Stef:  Not bad, and yourself?

Jeff: I'm good.

Stef:  Cool. Okay, gotta go.

4. Interactive. The difference between responsive and interactive speaking is the length and complexity of the interaction, which 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 the three dialogues cited above, A and B were transactional, and C was interpersonal.) 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 conversations. 5. Extensive (monologue).  Extensive oral production tasks include speeches, oral presentations, and story-telling, during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners is either highly limited (perhaps to nonverbal responses) or ruled out altogether. Language style is frequently more deliberative (planning is involved) and formal for extensive tasks, but we cannot rule out certain informal monologues such as casually delivered speech (for example, my vacation in the mountains, a recipe for outstanding pasta primavera, recounting, the plot of a novel or movie).

(b) Micro- And Macroskills Of Speaking

A list of listening micro- and macroskills enumerated various components of listening that make up criteria for assessment. A similar list of speaking skills can be drawn up for the same purpose: to serve as taxonomy of skills from which you will select one or several that will become the objective(s) of an assessment task. The microskills refer to producting the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations and phrasal units. The macroskills imply the speaker's_ focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options. The micro-and macroskills total roughly 16 different objectives to assess in speaking.

Micro- and macrosklls of oral production

Micro skills

1. Produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic             variants.

3.  Produce chunks of language of different lengths.

4.  Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure and intonation contours.

5.  Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.

6.  Use an adequate number of lexical units (words) to accomplish pragmatic purposes.

7.  Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery

8.  Monitor one's own oral production and use various strategic devices-pauses, tillers, self-corrections, backtracking-to enhance the clarity of the message.

9.  Use grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc), system (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), word order, patterns, rules and elliptical forms

10.  Produce speech in natural constituents: in appropriate phrases, pause groups, and sentence constituents

11.  Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms

12.  Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse

Macroskills

13. Appropriately accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals.

14.  Use appropriate styles, registers, implicature, redundancies, pragmatic conventions, conversations rules, floor keeping, and-yielding, interrupting, and other sociolinguistics features face to face conversations.

15. Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as local and peripheral ideas, events and feelings, new information and giving information, generalization and exemplification

16.  Convey facial features and kinesics, body language and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language.

17.  Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing for help, accurately assessing how well your interlocutor is understanding you.

As you consider designing tasks for assessing spoken language, these skills can act as a checklist of objectives. While the macroskills have the appearance of being more complex than the macroskills, both contain ingredients of difficulty, depending on the stage and context o the test-taker.

There is such an array of oral production tasks that a complete treatment is almost impossible within the confines of one chapter in this book Below is a consideration of the most common techniques with brief allusions to related tasks. As already noted in the introduction to this chapter, consider three important issues as you set out to design tasks:

1.  No speaking task is capable of isolating the single skill of oral production. Concurrent involvement of the additional performance of aural comprehension, and possibly reading, is usually necessary.

2.  Eliciting the specific criterion you have designated for a task can be tricky because beyond the world level, spoken language offers a number of productive options to test-takers. Make sure your elicitation prompt achieves its aims as closely as possible.

3.  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.

(c) Designing Assessment Tasks: Imitative Speaking

You may be surprised to see the inclusion of simple phonological imitation in a consideration of assessment of oral production. After all, endless repeating of words, phrases, and sentences was the province of the long-since-discarded Audiolingual Method, and in an era of communicative language teaching, many believe that non-meaningful imitation of sounds is fruitless. Such opinions have faded in recent years as we discovered that an overemphasis on fluency can sometimes lead to the decline of accuracy in speech. And so we have been paying more attention to pronunciation, especially suprasegmentals, in an attempt to help learners be more comprehensible.

An occasional phonologically focused repetition task is warranted as long as repetition tasks are not allowed to occupy a dominant role in an overall oral production assessment, and as long as you artfully avoid a negative washback effect. Such tasks range from word level to sentence level, usually with each item focusing on a specific phonological criterion. In a simple repetition task, test-takers repeat the stimulus, whether it is a pair of words, a sentence, or perhaps a question (to test for intonation production).

Word repetition task

Test-takers hear: Repeat after me:

beat [pause ] bit [pause ]

bat [ pause ] vat [ pause ]      etc.

I bought a boat yesterday.

The glow of the candle is growing.  etc.

When did they go on vacation?

Do you like coffee?     etc.

Test-takers repeat the stimulus.

A variation on such a task prompts test-takers with a brief written stimulus which they are to read aloud. (In the section below on intensive speaking, some tasks are described in which test-takers read aloud longer texts.) Scoring specifications must be clear in order to avoid reliability breakdowns. A common form of scoring simply indicates a two- or three-point system for each response.

TaskScoring scale for repetition ts

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. In such a case, it may he imperative to score only the criterion of the task. For example, in the sentence "When did they go on vacation?" since the criterion is falling intonation for wh-questions, points should be awarded regardless of any mispronunciation.

PHONEPASS TEST

An example of a popular test that uses imitative (as well as intensive) production tasks is PhonePass, a widely used, commercially available speaking test in many countries. Among a number of speaking tasks on the test, repetition of sentences (of 8 to 12 words) occupies a prominent role. It is remarkable that research on the PhonePass test has supported the construct validity of its repetition tasks not ju st for a test-taker's phonological ability but also for discourse and overall oral production ability (Townshend et al., 1998; Bernstein et al., 2000; Cascallar & Bernstein, 2000).

The PhonePass test elicits computer-assisted oral production over a telephone. "Test-takers read aloud, repeat sentences, say words, and answer questions. With a downloadable test sheet as a reference, test-takers are directed to telephone a designated number and listen for directions. The test has five sections. PhonePass* test specifications

Part A:

Test-takers read aloud selected sentences from among those printed on the test sheet. Examples:

1.  Traffic is a huge problem in Southern California.

2.  The endless city has no coherent mass transit system.

3.  Sharing rides was going to be the solution to rush-hour traffic.

4.  Most people still want to drive their own cars, though.

Part B:

Test-takers repeat sentences dictated over the phone. Examples: "Leave town on the next train"

(d) Designing Assessment Tasks: Intensive Speaking

At the intensive level, test-takers are prompted to produce short stretches of discourse (no more than a sentence) through which they demonstrate linguistic ability at a specified level of language. Many tasks are “cued” tasks in that they lead the test-taker into a narrow band of possibilities.

Parts C and D of the PhonePass test fulfill the criteria of intensive tasks as they elicit certain expected forms of language. Antonyms like  high  and  low ,  happy  and sad are prompted so that the automated scoring mechanism anticipates only one word. The either/or task of Part D fulfills the same criterion. Intensive tasks may be also be described as limited response tasks (Madsen, 1983), or mechanical tasks (Underhill, 1987), or what classroom pedagogy would label as controlled responses.

Directed Response Tasks

In this type of task, the test administrator elicits a particular grammatical form or a transformation of a sentence. Such tasks are clearly mechanical and not communicative, but they do require minimal processing of meaning in order to produce the correct grammatical output.

Directed response

Test-takers hear:  Tell me he went home.

Tell me that you like rock music.

Tell me that you aren't interested in tennis.

Tell him to come to my office at noon.

Remind him what time it is.

Read-Aloud Tasks

Intensive reading-aloud tasks include reading beyond the sentence level up to a paragraph or two. This technique is easily administered by selecting a passage that incorporates test specs and by recording the test-taker's output; the scoring is relatively easy because all of the test-taker's oral production is controlled. Because of the results of research on the PhonePass test, reading aloud may actually be a surprisingly strong indicator of overall oral production ability. For many decades, foreign language programs have used reading passages to analyze oral production. Prator's (1972)  

Manual  of   American  English Pronunciation  included a “diagnostic passage” of about 150 words that students could read aloud into a tape recorder. Teachers listening to the recording would then rate students on a number of phonological factors (vowels, diphthongs, consonants, consonant clusters, stress, and intonation) by completing a two-page diagnostic checklist on which all errors or questionable items were noted. These checklists ostensibly offered direction to the teacher for emphases in the course to come. An earlier form of the Test of Spoken English (TSE@, see below) incorporated one read-aloud passage of about 120 to 130 words with a rating scale for pronunciation and fluency. The following passage is typical:

Read-aloud stimulus, paragraph length

Despite the decrease in size-and, some would say, quality of our cultural world, there still remain strong differences between the usual British and American writing styles. The question is, how do you get your message across? English prose conveys its most novel ideas as if they were timeless truths, while American writing exaggerates; if you believe half of what is said, that's enough. The former uses understatement; the latter, overstatement. There are also disadvantages to each characteristic approach. Readers who are used to being screamed at may not listen when someone chooses to whisper politely. At the same time, the individual who is used to a quiet manner may reject a series of loud imperatives.

The scoring scale for this passage provided a four-point scale for pronunciation and for fluency, as shown in the box below.

Test of Spoken English scoring scale (1987, p. 10)

Pronunciation:

Points:

0.0-0.4  Frequent phonemic errors and foreign stress and Intonation patterns that cause the speaker to he unintelligible.

0.5-1.4  Frequent phonemic errors and foreign stress and Intonation patterns that cause the speaker to be occasionally unintelligible.

1.5-2.4  Some consistent phonemic errors and foreign stress and  intonation patterns, but the speaker is intelligible.

2.5-3.0  Occasional non-native pronunciation errors, but the speaker is always intelligible.

Fluency:

Points:

0.0-0.4  Speech is so halting and fragmentary or has such a non-native    flow that intelligibility is virtually impossible.

0.5-1.4  Numerous non-native pauses and/or a non-native flow that   interferes with intelligibility.

1.5-2.4  Some non-native pauses but with a more nearly native flow that the pauses do not interfere with intelligibility.

2.5-3.0 Speech is smooth and effortless, closely approximating  that of a native speaker.

Such a rating list does not indicate how to gauge intelligibility, which is mentioned in both lists. Such slippery terms remind us that oral production scoring, even with the controls that reading aloud offers, is still an inexact science. Underhill (1987. op. 77-78) suggested some variations on the task of simply reading a short passage.

•  reading a scripted dialogue, with someone else reading the other part

•  reading sentences containing minimal pairs, for example:

Try not to heat/hit the pan too much.

The doctor gave me a  bill/pill.

•  reading information from a table or chart

If reading aloud shows certain practical advantages (predictable output, practicality, reliability in scoring), there are several drawbacks to using this technique for assessing oral production. Reading aloud is somewhat inauthentic in that we 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. Also, reading aloud calls on certain  specialized oral abilities that may not indicate one's pragmatic ability to communicate orally in face-to-face contexts. You should therefore employ this technique with some caution, and certainly supplement it as an assessment task with other, more communicative procedures.

Sentence/Dialogue Completion Tasks and Oral Questionnaires

Another technique for targeting intensive aspects of language requires test-takers to read dialogue in which one speaker's lines have been omitted. Test-takers are first given time to read through the dialogue 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-taker responds. Here's an example.

Dialogue completion task

Test-takers read (and then hear): 

In a department store:

Salesperson:   May I help you? 

Customer:  ................................

Salesperson:   Okay, what size do you wear? 

Customer: ................................

Salesperson:   Hmmm. How about this green sweater here? 

Customer: ................................

Salesperson:   Oh. Well, if you don't like green, what color would you like? 

Customer: ................................

Salesperson:   How about this one? 

Customer: ................................

Salesperson:   Great! 

Customer: ................................

Salesperson:   It's on sale today for $39.95. 

Customer: ................................

Salesperson:   Sure, we take Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. 

Customer: ................................

Test-takers respond with appropriate lines.

 An advantage of this technique lies in its moderate control of the output of the test-taker. While individual variations in responses are accepted, the technique taps into a learner's ability to discern expectancies in a conversation and to produce sociolinguistically correct language. One disadvantage of this technique is its reliance on literacy and an ability to transfer easily from written to spoken English. Another disadvantage is the contrived, inauthentic nature of this task: Couldn't the same criterion performance be elicited in a live interview in which an impromptu role-play technique is used?

Perhaps more useful is a whole host of shorter dialogues of two or three lines, each of which aims to elicit a specified target. In the following examples, somewhat unrelated items attempt to elicit the past tense, future tense, yes/no question formation, and asking for the time. Again, test-takers see the stimulus in written form.

In designing such questions for test-takers, it's important to make sure that you know why  you are asking the question. Are you simply trying to elicit strings of language output to gain a general sense of the test-taker's discourse competence? Are you combining discourse and grammatical competence in the same question? In each question just one in a whole set of related questions? Responsive questions may take the following forms:

Question eliciting open-ended responses

Test-takers hear:

1.  What do you think about the weather today?

2.  What do you like about the English language?

3.  Why did you choose your academic major?

4. What kind of strategies have you used to help you learn English?

5.  a. Have you ever been to the United States before?

b. What other countries have you visited?

c. Why did you go there? What did you like best about lt?

d. If you could go back, what would you like to do or see?

e. What country would you like to visit next, and why?

Test-takers respond with a few sentences at most.

Notice that question #5 has five situationally linked question that may vary slightly depending on the test-takers’ response to a previous question.

Oral interaction with attest administrator often involves the letter forming all the question. The flip side of this usual concept of question-and-answer tasks to elicit  from the test-takers. To assess the test-takers ability to produce question, prompts such as this can be used:

Elicitation of question from the test-takers

Test-takers hear:

•  Do you have any question for me?

•  Ask me about my family or job interest.

•  If you could interview the president or prime minister of your country, what would you ask the person?

Test-takers respond with question.

A potentially tricky from of oral production assessment involves more than one test-takers with an interviewer, which is discussed later in this chapter. With two students in a interviewer context, both test-takers can ask question of each other.

Directed response tasks

Test-takers see:

Interviewer  :  What did you do last weekend?

Test-taker :  ...................................?

Interviewer  :  What will you do afte r you graduate from this program?

Test-taker   ...................................?

 

Interviewer  :  I was in Japan for two weeks.

Test-taker :     ...................................?

 

Interviewer :  It’s ten-thirty.

One could contend that performance on these items is responsive rather than intensive. True, the discourse involves responses, but there is a degree of control here that predisposes the test-taker to respond with certain expected forms. Such arguments underscore the fine lines of distinction between and among the selected live categories.

It could also be argued that such techniques are nothing more than a written form of questions that might otherwise (and more appropriately) be part of a standard or-al interview. True, but the advantage that the written form offers is to pro-vide a little more time for the test-taker to anticipate an answer, and it begins to remove the potential ambiguity created by aural misunderstanding. It helps to unlock the almost ubiquitous link between listening and speaking performance.

Underhill (1987) describes yet another technique that is useful for controlling the test-taker’s output: form-filling, or what I might rename "oral questionnaire." Here the test-taker sees a questionnaire that asks for certain categories of information (personal data, academic information, job experience, etc.) and supplies the information orally

(e) Designing Assessment Tasks: Responsive Speaking

Assessment of responsive tasks involves brief interactions with an interlocutor, differing from intensive tasks in the increased creativity given to the test-taker and from  interactive tasks by the somewhat limited length of utterances.

Question and Answer

Question-and-answer tasks 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 They can vary from simple questions like "What is this called in English?" to complex questions like-What are the steps governments should take, if any, to stem the rate of deforestation in tropical countries?" The first question is intensive in its purpose; it is a display question intended to elicit a predetermined correct response. We have already looked at some of these types of questions in the previous section. 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.

(f)  Designing Assessment Tasks: Interactive Speaking

The final two categories of oral production assessment (interactive and extensive speaking) include 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).The obvious difference between the two sets of tasks is the degree of interaction with an interlocutor. Also, interactive tasks are what some would describe as interpersonal, while the final category includes more transac-tional speech events.

Interview

When "oral production assessment" is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind. Is an oral Interview: a test administrator and a test taker alt down In a direct face to face exchange and proceed through a protocol of questions and directives, The interview, which may be tape-recorded for re-listening, is then scored on one or more parameters such as accuracy in pronunciation and/or grammar, vocabulary usage, fluency, sociolinguistic/pragmatic appropriateness, task accomplishment, and even comprehension.

Interviews can vary in length from perhaps five to forty-five minutes, depending on their purpose and context. Placement interviews, designed to get a quick spoken sample from a student in order to verify placement into a course. May need only five minutes if the interviewer is trained to evaluate tits output accurately. Longer comprehensive interviews such as the OPI (sec the next section) arc designed to cover predetermined oral production contexts and may require the better part of an hour.

Every effective interview contains a number of mandatory stages. Two decades ago, Michael Canale (1984) proposed a framework for oral proficiency testing that has withstood the test of time. He suggested that test-takers will perform at their best if they are led through four stages:

1 .  Warm-up. In a minute or so of preliminary small talk, the interviewer directs mutual introductions, helps the test-taker become comfortable with the situation, apprises the test-taker of the format, and allays anxieties. No scoring of this phase takes place.

2.   Level check . Through a series of preplanned questions, the interviewer stimulates the test-taker to respond using expected or predicted forms and functions. If, for example, from previous test information, grades, or other data, the test-taker has been judged to be a "Level 2" (see below) speaker, the interviewer's prompts will attempt to confirm this assumpti on. The responses may take very simple or very complex form, depending on the entry level of the learner. Questions are usually designed to elicit grammatical categories (such as past tense or subject-verb agreement), discourse structure (a sequence of events), vocabulary usage, and/or sociolinguistic factors (politeness conventions, formal/informal language).This stage could also give the interviewer a picture of the test-taker's extroversion, readiness to speak, and confidence, all of which may be of significant consequence in the interview's results. Linguistic target criteria are scored in this phase. If this stage is lengthy, a tape-recording of the interview is important.

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. Probe questions may be complex in their framing and/or complex in their cognitive and linguistic demand. Through probe items, the interviewer discovers the ceiling or limitation of the test-taker's profi-ciency. This need not be a separate stage entirely, but might be a set of questions that are interspersed into the previous stage. At the lower levels of proficiency, probe items may simply demand a higher range of vocabulary or grammar from the test-taker than predicted. At the higher levels, probe items will typically ask the test-taker to give an opinion or a value judgment, to discuss his or her field of specialization, to recount a narrative, or to respond to questions that are worded in complex form. Responses to probe questions may be scored, or they may be ignored if the test-taker displays an inability to handle such complexity.

4. Wind down . This final phase of the interview is simply a short period of time during which the interviewer encourages the test-taker to relax with some easy questions, sets the test-taker's mind at ease, and provides information about when and where to obtain the results of the interview. This part is not scored.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENTS: EXTENSIVE SPEAKING

Extensive speaking tasks involve  complex, relatively lengthy stretches of discourse. They are frequently variations on monologues, usually with minimal verbal interaction.

Oral Presentations

In the academic and professional arenas, it would not be uncommon to be called on to present a report, a paper, a marketing plan, a sales idea, a design of a new product, or a method. A summary of oral assessment techniques would therefore be incom-plete without some consideration of extensive speaking tasks. Once again the rules for effective assessment must be invoked: (a) specify the criterion, (b) set appr opriate tasks, (c) elicit optimal output, and (d) establish practical, reliable scoring procedures. And once again scoring is the key assessment challenge.

For oral presentations, a checklist or grid is a common means of scoring or evaluation, Holistic scores arc tempting to use for their apparent practicality; but they may obscure the variability of performance across several subcategories, especially the two major components of content and delivery. Following is an example of a checklist for a prepared oral presentation at the intermediate or advanced level of English.

Retelling a Story, News Event

In this type of task, test-takers hear or read a story or news event that they are asked to retell. This differs from the paraphrasing task discussed above (pages 161-162) in that it is a longer stretch of discourse and a different genre. The objectives in assigning such a task vary from listening comprehension of the original to production of a number of oral discourse features (communicating sequences and relationships of events, stress and emphasis patterns, ”expression” in the cast of a dramatic story), fluency, and interaction with the hearer. Scoring should of course meet the intended criteria.

Translation (of Extended Prose)

Translation of words, phrases, or short sentences was mentioned under the category of intensive speaking. Here, 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 of a product, a synopsis of a story or play or movie, directions on how to find something on a map, and other genres. The advantage of translation is in the control of the content, vocabulary, and, to some extent, the grammatical and discourse features. The disadvantage is that translation of longer texts is a highly specialized skill for which some individuals obtain post-baccalaureate degrees! To judge a nonspecialist's oral language ability on such a skill may be completely invalid, espe-cially if the test-taker has not engaged in translation at this level. Criteria for scoring should therefore take into account not only the purpose in stimulating a translation but the possibility of errors thatare unrelated to oral production ability.

One consequence of our being articulate mammals is an extraordinarily complex system of vocal communication that has evolved over the millennia of human existence. This chapter has offered a relatively sweeping overview of some of the ways we have learned to assess our wonderful ability to produce sounds, words, and sentences, and to string them together to make meaningful texts. This chapter's limited number of assessment techniques may encourage your imagination to explore a potentially limitless number of possibilities for assessing oral production.